Let's Blame Bobby: Part Four

I located a document from the CIA's own Secret History, in which the CIA's History Staff is interviewing a CIA officer named Sam Halpern. Halpern reveals his own incredulity that Bobby Kennedy should be working with the Mafia in attempts on the life of Castro at the very same time that he was trying to send other Mafia figures to jail. A CIA operative named Charley Ford, alias Charley Fiscalini, was assigned by Bobby Kennedy to make contact with Mafia types....

(p.16)
SH [Halpern]: ...The one thing that I don't know enough about is when we had to assign an officer to Bobby Kennedy, to be used by Bobby Kennedy to make contact with Mafia types in this country and in Canada. That Bobby Kennedy would pick and set the appointment time and place and our case officer would then go and meet whoever this person was and come back and report to Bobby Kennedy. The theory behind this apparently was that Bobby had some bright idea that the Mafia must have left some kind of stay-behind network in Cuba because of all of their interests that they had in Cuba when Fidel came in: prostitution, gambling, drug running and whatever else... He said they must have had a good stay-behind network and we could get some decent information to what's going on. Well...we never got any information that was worth disseminating. I never saw any information at all from it. The case officer I picked.... Apparently the way the request came was from Bobby to General Marshall Carter, who was then DDCI [Deputy Director of Central Intelligence], to Bill Harvey, Bill Harvey to me, to pick a case officer to assign to Bobby. I sat with Bruce Cheever and then, of course, with Bill himself and we decided on a guy named Charles Ford, Charley Ford.... We figured he was the best kind of guy. Charley and I sat and we figured out he's got to have some kind of name to use - we can't use Charley Ford.... Charley and I sat in my office...and we said "How about Charley Rocky Fiscalini." And ever since then, I always called Charley, til he died, "Rocky." We came up with Fiscalini. There are two different ways of spelling it. I spelled it FISCALINI and Angie Novella [sic, Novello], Bobby Kennedy's secretary, spelled it on her appointment log, FISCOLLINI, which is probably more ethnic than mine. But anyway, Fiscalini is the way you pronounce it. So Charley went off and he made several trips in the United States, and I know he made at least one if not more in Canada - I think it was Toronto. All at the behest of Bobby. Either Bobby himself would talk to Charley on the phone, or Angie Novella would call Charley on what we euphemistically called a secure phone - nothing more than an outside line that we had (p. 17) in the front office of Task Force W - it was a big bullpen where we had four or five secretaries.... There was a big section in here where we had a bunch of special assistants, and Charley Ford was one of those who sat in here. There were about four or five guys in there doing all kinds of different things. Charley never, as far as I know, never spoke. I know he never spoke to me about who he saw - what they talked about - and I never never saw any intelligence information to disseminate, and as far as I know Charley never had any intelligence information to disseminate. To us it was a waste of time and effort, plus we were putting a man in real danger, since, from pure tradecraft point of view we wanted to control, the meeting time and the meeting place. We wanted to set it up, and we don't want to walk into a hornet's nest without knowing who or what we're seeing. I have mentioned this to several people, without mentioning Charley Ford's name until recently, and I'll tell you why in a minute. I mentioned it to Scott Breckenridge, and Scott mentioned it in his last book that he put out. I mentioned it to a fellow by the name of [Ronald] Goldfarb, who was an attorney on Kennedy's staff at the Justice Department, and Goldfarb wrote a book in which he quotes me on this, and then he also says he doesn't believe me and he doesn't know why I'm making these kinds of stories up.

MW [Michael Warner]: He's defending Bobby Kennedy.

SH: Oh, absolutely, no question about that. I mentioned it to other people along the way and I even mentioned it to Seymour Hersh when he was putting his book together "The Dark Side of Camelot." If you look at, I forget what page it is, there's a footnote there. Sy was the one who found in doing his researches...as a result of the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, in all the documents that were produced as a result of that, Angie Novella, in her log - her appointment and telephone log for 1962 - puts down General Carter, Charles Ford (Fiscalini), for a date, for a meeting with Bobby Kennedy. I've got documentary proof now. I'd like to shove it under Goldfarb's nose, but anyway....Hersh puts that as a footnote in his book in which he says until he, Hersh, was able to show me the log. I had always refused to mention the name of the individual who was the case officer. The fact that Kennedy was involved in trying to work with the Mafia at the same time.... He, Goldfarb, couldn't believe that Kennedy would be working with the Mafia at the same (p. 18) time he's trying to send them to jail. "He's your boss" I would say to Goldfarb, "he wasn't my boss, I can't figure him out any better than you can." Now I'm told by Chuck Briggs that in the pile of paper that he's looking at now - as a result of the AARB nonsense - they have found two memorandums from the Church Committee - the Schwieker [sic, Schweiker] subcommittee of the Church Committee. I had forgotten that I had testified before the Schwieker Subcommittee. Chuck now tells me that not only did I testify - and he's looking at my transcript of my testimony - but he also has Charley Ford's testimony. Where Charley....I don't know what he says - Chuck hasn't shown it to me - but he says "That is there, it's in great detail, it's longer than yours," so obviously Charley must have told the Schwieker committee what I'm telling you now. That he actually was assigned to Bobby and did what Bobby had asked him to do. Which is to go meet Mafia types. What they said, unless Charley says in his testimony - and all this is under oath - I don't know what Charley said, but you guys go ahead and look at it. I haven't got the clearances yet until it's declassified. Can't even look at my own testimony.... People have said that, as a result of this, that Charley and Bobby must have been working on using the Mafia in some kind of assassination plots. Check what Charley says in his testimony; I don't know what they did. They never said. Charley never talked to me about that. He would always stick his head in before he left on another trip, "I'm off again, Sam. Bye." The reason I know he went to Canada - I think it was Toronto was because he came in for the first time and said, "I'm leaving the country." I said "Where the Hell are you going?" He says "Canada." Charley was a damn fine officer, and I'm awfully sorry he died so early.

In terms of talking about assassination plotting, it gets kind of hairy after a while. It's hard to know when to stop, and you don't even know when you start something. I remember under Des[mond Fitzgerald]; when Des came in on that Monday morning for example... (p. 19) This is what always made me think somewhere during those weekends he must have seen Bobby, because he came in all charged up. I asked him over and over again, not just once but several times, where the heck is this pressure coming from? I don't see it myself except through you. He said, "It's coming from high places." He never said Bobby. It's coming from outside the agency, and Des is an honest guy. I can't say he's making this up. Why would he be doing that? So I have to assume he's getting it from somebody who's got the authority to tell him, without going through the chain of command. It's a surmise on my part; I can't prove it.

BL [Brian Latell]: Who up the chain of command knew about Charley and Bobby?

SH: Carter. Marshall Carter, the DDCI.

BL: And that was all?

SH: As far as I know. Helms never knew. I know that much.

MW: Fitzgerald?

SH: No. It was all over by then. Charley's activities stopped after the Missile Crisis....

MW: McCone?

SH: Unless Carter told him.

MW: Why would Carter be in the loop and not McCone?

SH: I don't know. I'm looking at Angie Novella's logs, that's the only way I know Carter's in the loop. It says Carter, right there....

(p. 20)
SH: ....Sy [Seymour Hersh] once called me when he was still doing his research on the book, and he kept on asking me, who? who? who? I said "Not me, I'm not going to tell you the name." He called me on the phone one morning and he said, "How does Fiscalini strike you?" I said, "where...did you ever get that name?" He told me. He said "It's from Angie Novella's appointment logs." I said run that by me again, slowly. Well because it's got Ford and Fiscalini but it could be Ford. He gave me Fiscalini. There were only two guys in the world that I knew of that had that name. We never told Harvey, we never told Bruce Cheever. Didn't need to. Theoretically we were professionals.

MW: You just had it because you had to clear it. You basically had to sign his vouchers and make sure his travel was getting paid for and everything.

SH: That's all we did. If you've got the finance records you can find out where he went and every time he went, but if I know Charley....He fixed it up in such a way that that didn't really show. He wouldn't ask for stuff. When Sy said "Fiscalini", I said "You got me hands down." I said "It's the only time I ever lied to you." It was true. It was the only time I ever held anything back. When I start talking I know my limits.

BL: Did you lie to him or you just didn't tell him?

(p. 21)
SH: I hadn't told him. I must have never told him the name. He's got a note to that effect; a footnote on that same page where he talks about this operation in the book.... In terms of assassination plots, first of all they're few and far between. In terms of getting involved in one of these things. Being in the business we were in, with the old rules and regulations that we had - and we didn't have to worry about a Senate Intelligence Committee and a House Intelligence Committee - we did lots of things just by feel, by gosh and by golly. As Larry Houston told me when the Church committee started to expose lots of things, Larry said, "Sam, I told you. You should have talked to me about a lot of these things. We wouldn't be here today." I said, "Yeah, Larry, and you know why we didn't talk to you in those days? Because you would have stopped a lot of us from doing things." He says, "Very right." That's the way life was, and I'm sure that there are other officers.... I'm just one of many who were involved in different parts of the world, doing a whole variety of things, with almost no way to pin down somebody saying, "I authorized X, Y, or Z." That goes even for State intelligence collection, because some of the intelligence collection was done by some screwball ideas.

BL: Sam, you've just talked about Bobby Kennedy and CIA and Mafia assassination plotting against Castro. Many scholars have concluded, though on just circumstantial evidence, that Jack Kennedy was also fully witting, if not involved in assassination plotting against Castro. Do you have a view about that?

SH: Yes, I agree with the people who say the same thing because I can't imagine Bobby on his own without telling Brother Jack some of the things he's done, and including probably Jack being the inspiration for some of the things that Bobby finally did. I think they were so close together......

(p. 22)
SH: ...The problem that Goldfarb had, for example - because he was one of the Lawyers attacking the Mafia, trying to put them in jail - and he just couldn't.... He was sitting in my living room and he just couldn't understand, and he kept on saying, "how could Bobby tell me to put the Mafia in jail when he's working with them?" I said, "I don't know how he could do that. You worked for him, you tell me." But he did. I couldn't prove it then, but if you guys ever release those Charley Ford memo's and my memo, at least we've got two statements done under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee, or the Church Committee really, where at least it's being discussed. I don't see how anybody, on any of this stuff, particularly after the Bay of Pigs Operation, dealing with the Agency, I don't think anything was said or done between the two guys that the other one didn't know. They had to. Bobby may have stayed away from the Agency up before the Bay of Pigs, but after the Bay of Pigs he was always Johnny at the rathole on everything. Didn't understand what he was doing either, in many cases.

(p. 23)
SH: ...[Richard] Bissell was no kind of guy to - let alone Tracy Barnes - to be involved in assassination plotting. They didn't know what the hell they were doing. Tracy wouldn't know. The record is clear, and it's even in the Church Committee report, for Christ's sake, that a message came from headquarters to the Havana station, when it was still there, talking about assassination. The very next morning, when someone saw (p.24) the confirmation copy, a flash went out saying "Ignore the message." Who the hell wrote the message, Tracy. I mean that is the silliest thing I've ever seen. The last thing in the world you want on paper. Just like when Lansdale talked about elimination of leaders in the August 10, 1962 meeting of the Special Group (Augmented). Puts it in writing and Harvey goes through the roof. It's all out there now, but that's the kind of people who don't know what the hell it's all about. They never tried.

(p. 76)
INTERVIEWER: What was your feeling in the [Senate Select Committee] executive session in which you were being questioned?

MR. HALPERN: I felt that I was dealing with a bunch of nincompoops and idiots.

INTERVIEWER: On the part of the staff?

MR. HALPERN: Staff and the Senators present. Goldwater was the only one that I thought had a feeling for what was going on. Schweiker was an ass. Huddleston and Mondale were totally incompetent on this particular subject, maybe because he was new [sic]. I testified in June of '75. I would have thought by that time they would have gotten some briefings from their staff as to what the hell was going on....

(p. 77)
INTERVIEWER: How did they happen to have you come and testify?

MR. HALPERN: I don't know for sure. I think it was because [former CIA Director Richard] Helms was being called back so many times for the various committees, that he was almost like a yo-yo from Teheran as Ambassador. And I think he practically had a commuter ticket on some of the airlines the way he was coming back and forth. And on one of his trips, he asked me to brief him, and Tom Karamessines, a matter of fact, about the background on the Cuban Missile Crisis and some of the activities during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The whole Operation MONGOOSE thing. Particularly MONGOOSE which was very hot at that particular point. And a few other details. The brass isn't suppose to remember details. That's what they got guys like me around for. That's what I get paid for. So I talked to Dick and I talked to Tom and gave them as much as I could. And I just guessed that somewhere along the way in their private discussion or private testimony the stuff that wasn't the public stuff, before you get in front of the public television and what have you, Dick must have said or Tom must have said, "and if you want any more detail get a hold of Sam." Or something like that, I guess. And so sure enough, I get the call. I didn't care. I got nothing to hide. Because I'm proud of what I did all these years. And so if they don't like it, that's tough. Change the system. And that's how I think I got picked. And I remember when the Church Committee began, one of my retired colleagues, and his wife who is also a retired colleague, his wife was (p. 78) on the Committee Staff. She arranged a dinner party with several of the new staff types... Anyway, at this dinner party, my wife came along too. But anyway, I was the target of the night, obviously, and everybody zeroed in on me, before dinner and after dinner and everything else. In terms to the approach to this whole business, where do we go from here and how. And I pointed out that they were in a totally different environment than they've ever been before, telling them this was a different kind of a game, and I said, "You are going to be surprised at the fact that you are not going to find very much paper around. And you are not going to find whole treatises like you do in law cases and what have you." And I said, "You are going to see my name and my initials on literally thousands of pieces of paper. But I'd be willing to bet you're not going to find more than a smattering of any substance before that initial or before that name. You are going to find all kinds of references to 'as we discussed' and 'why don't we talk about this' and, you know, 'let's see what we can do about this,' 'why don't we talk about this sometime in the future'. You are going to find very meaningless comments." And the guy said, "Don't you guys ever put anything in writing?" I said, "We can, but if we can avoid it, no"....

(p. 79) ....And when I got under oath, yeah I told them the truth. They didn't like to hear it. I got into a big shouting contest with a guy called Gary Hart.... And he made some remark in the back there and I shouted back at him. I didn't give a damn. I made some remark about the Operation MONGOOSE we were talking about at the time and I said this was, as far as I was concerned, this was American foreign policy made by the President. And this voice in the back...said something about, "Hey, well that doesn't make American foreign policy." I said, "As far as I'm concerned if the President says that is what we are doing and the Attorney General agrees, that's what we are doing. That's foreign policy." You know, and Church cut [us] off......

(p. 81)
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any impression that what you had said in that session went beyond that session?

MR. HALPERIN: Oh yeah. Because I started to open up on MONGOOSE, on Ed Lansdales' connection, and the fact that this was not a CIA operation, regardless of what anybody might want to tell them, that it was a government-wide operation and it was run right out of Robert Kennedy's office, by Robert Kennedy, and even Landsdale [sic] was not in charge. He was the chief of staff to Kennedy, Robert Kennedy. It was run out of Kennedy's office and Robert and Jack Kennedy were one practically, and that McCone, McNamara and Rusk had each refused to go along with one of Landsdale's ideas that even Kennedy couldn't force on them. And that was, originally, Landsdale's idea for MONGOOSE was for each of the agencies in town to detail men, money, and material out of the Agency to what amounts to a new MONGOOSE agency under Landsdale and Kennedy. And McCone was the first to have said, "Hell no." He (p. 82) said, "That money was appropriated by Congress under my command, my responsibility. It stays with me. We'll work with you and we'll help you and we'll be part of your team kind of thing. But I can't relinquish control over men, money, and material as appropriated to me." And McNamara said the same thing and Rusk said the same thing so that they didn't achieve creating a brand new Agency in effect. And this was all brand new to the guys sitting around that table [at Committee hearings]. It might not have been new to F.A.O. Schwarz, who seemed to understand something about Landsdale's role, because when I started to talk about Landsdale being in command and being in direct communication with us and issuing orders directly in the name of Kennedy, etc., etc., I remember Church saying to Schwarz, "Is General Landsdale available anywhere?" And Schwarz saying something, "Yes sir. We have tracked him down, he lives in..." I think he said Falls Church or something. He lives in Virginia anyway, "and we're tryng to get in touch with him to have him come here." And a little later on he did come and testify. But this was seen like brand new stuff to them. This was June, mind you. And one of the things they were after was Rogue Elephant running operations against Cuba. And it had been written about quite a bit and all that kind of stuff. And they didn't have a clue. And they didn't like the idea that, as far as I was concerned, the Kennedy boys were in charge. And they were running the war. And we were fighting a war against Cuba, undeclared or otherwise, but we were fighting a war. I said if we were sending people in to create sabotage activities inside Cuba, we were blowing things up, people got killed on both sides, on their side and our side. And I said -- that's when I got into a fight with Hart. I remember that now. And that was foreign policy as far as I was concerned. And that's [when Gary] Hart said, "It wasn't, the Congressman is involved." I said, "The hell with that." I said (p. 83) Congress was providing the money. And we didn't create our own money. We didn't create our own weapons. And they knew what we were doing. And so, that was, I remember now, that was the fight with Hart.

INTERVIEWER: And did they push the issue whether John F. Kennedy knew about all these activities?

MR. HALPERIN: Yeah, with me as far as I was concerned. Yeah, I said I assume that the Attorney General reported to the President and Landsdale reported and Landsdale did not leave his office. He was in General Erskine's office in the Pentagon. And he didn't leave his office. He stayed there physically and in that office but he directed activities from there in the name of the President and the Attorney General. That was MONGOOSE, I said. And it is all written up now in the Church Report. They finally got all the stuff straight, pretty much straight. There are some errors in it. But I try to correct them. It doesn't always work. But that was one of the things that bothered me, the Senators themselves were being led around as they usually are, I think, by the staff. They don't have enough time in the day I suppose to do all of these things. And the staff, even by June, is just beginning to get their feet wet on something like this. And they were looking into other operations. One was an Indonesian operation which was brought under Eisenhower's aegis. And I think they were hoping to use that again as another example of a Rogue Elephant.... and they never talked to me about that, although they should have. They talked to a lot of other people and I guess they figured by the time they talked to enough people they didn't have to talk to me, because the record on that is so complete. You talk about paper. Now that one we had plenty of paper on, because everything was done by cable and memos. And it was so complete and so accurate, in terms of starting with the (p. 84) President's approval, Eisenhower's approval, and all the things that we did through the then 5412 Committee, and the papers on that were clear, and all the cable traffic was clear, that they figured there was no way they were going to pin that on CIA as a CIA operation because that was again, State, CIA and Defense all working as a team. We were carrying the main load at that level, but everybody was involved. No question. And all the record was there, so I guess they couldn't use that as a Rogue Elephant operation. The reason they hit the MONGOOSE one, I think, was because, Cuba being Cuba, the assassination efforts and that kind of stuff, they had to keep it back.

INTERVIEWER: And it seemed to me that there was some mention along the way that the Agency was not going to call back people from retirement to participate in the investigations.

MR. HALPERN: That's correct. And the Agency did nothing to help anybody, even serving officers without giving them any legal assistance. They were told to go get their own lawyers....