A Trujillo Sponsored Assassination

[James Richards]

James, are there any more details of the accident, e.g. witnesses, that might prove it was actually an accident (as opposed to his being forced off the road)?

How about any further information of the house explosion in which Abbess Garcia died in 1967?  That certainly seems suspicious although houses do sometimes explode because of gas leaks, etc.

 

The issue of the potential involvement in the Kennedy assassination of people upset over the Trujillo assassination seems a plausible theory at least worthy of additional research.  GPH mentioned that there was a book by an author named, as I recall, Diederich, that discussed this.  Anyone have a reference to this book by chance?

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Tim,

The book is called 'Trujillo: The Death Of The Dictator' by Bernard Diederich.

I am unaware of any witnesses to the Rubirosa accident.

The explosion that killed Abbes happened after he went to Haiti and to work for Papa Doc. Abbes and his whole family were killed and the general consensus is that Joaquin Balaguer was behind it. There was nothing suspicious about the explosion at all, it was a deliberate and successful assassination.

James

[Pat Speer]

Interesting post, Pat.

I do not believe there is sufficient information to link Maheu to the assassination and I think we should be cautiuous making allegations about people who are still alive.  I think Maheu had been backed out of the anti-Castro stuff by the CIA (along with Giancana) when William Harvey arrived.  It then became a Harvey-Rosselli operation.

It has been reported that Rip Robertson and David Morales were both drinking buddies of Rosselli.  I'm sure you are aware of this.

Maheu's children called Rosselli "Uncle Johnny."  If Rosselli was involved Maheu almost certainly knew about it.  Maheu was also an old friend of Guy Banister's; if Rosselli visited Banister, as has been reported, Maheu was almost certainly his connection.  I make no bones that I consider Maheu the smelliest of fishes; he lied under oath numerous times about his maintaining deniability for the CIA in the Castro hits; he admits in his book he told Rosselli from the outset.

It has been a while since I read the Church Committee's summary of the Trujillo plot.  Do you havce support for the fact that: (1) JFK was aware of it in the first place; (2) that he tried to call it off; and (3) that it was Tracey Barnes that kept it going?

I believe the Church Committee goes into detail how the CIA tried to turn off the hit; they couldn't risk another Bay of Pigs.  In their report, and reported by me on the Someone Would have Talked thread on this website, it is explained that a senior CIA officer okayed handing some rifles over to the assassins as a way of letting them know we supported them. One of these rifles was found in the possession of one of the assassins, although the rifle itself was not used.  What's worse, the Church Committee found memos from the CIA to the station in the Dominican asking them not to inform the State Department of this transfer.  In the book Spymasters Richard Bissell confirms that this was Barnes.

I think there may have been a number of different groups that coalesced in the Kennedy assassination.  Certainly Davidson could have been, as you suggest, a link between the Trujillo forces and Marcello and the organized crime forces.

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Edited March 13, 2005 by Pat Speer

[Tim Gratz]

Thanks for the information, Pat.

I know you consider Maheu the "smelliest of fish" but, respectfully, although he was certainly involved in numerous "dirty deals" I do not see sufficient (any?) evidence to link him to the assassination. I see no reason that Rosselli would necessarily tell Maheu about a plot to kill Kennedy. I think the mafia achieved success in criminal affairs because it employed the same "need to know" criteria as did the CIA. Unless Maheu was himself involved in the plot, Rosselli would have no need to tell him about it. And if Rosselli's death was Linked to his knowledge of the secrets of the Kennedy assassination, Maheu's very survival may demonstrate he had no such knowledge.

Re the Trujillo assassination, I don't have the book with me but I will cite it later, in which a Trujillo military aide states that Rosselli and E. Howard Hunt were in the Dominican Republic (I think in April of 1961) and encouraging the assassination of Trujillo. It would be interesting to try to track this one down. I do not recall any other history showing an association between Hunt and Rosselli. Are you aware of any? I don't necessarily credit the report in the book. It would certainly be advisable to read the book itself to evaluate the accuracy of that report. I understand Rossselli was by then under relatively constant FBI surveillance so it is possible an examination of Rosselli's 1961 FBI file COULD show that he was NOT in the Dominican Republic any time prior January through May of 1961.

Edited March 13, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Pat Speer]

I'm not aware of the book, Tim. My belief in Maheu's involvement is mostly circumstantial, of course. But if you're imagining an assassination involving the mob and the CIA, by someone with insight and influence within the FBI, then Maheu was your man. He was in a unique position. As a CIA cut-out he could plan all sorts of criminal activity and use his CIA ties to avoid prosecution. I believe the wire-tapping case is a key to understanding the assassination. Maheu claimed the wire-tapping of Phyllis McGuire was done on behalf of the CIA or with the CIA's permission, depending on who he was telling the story to, when everyone else involved was certain that Maheu wire-tapped her as a favor to Giancana, and then pressured the CIA to cover-up his act. Thus, he was able to turn his involvement in the hits into a get-out-of-jail-free card. Whether or not they were involved, this incident would undoubtedly have sent the message to Giancana that with Maheu's contacts he could kill the President and get away with it. While people like Morales had the contacts within the Cuban community to kill Kennedy, I believe it would have taken someone like Maheu to pull the whole thing off.

Edited March 14, 2005 by Pat Speer

[James Richards]

This is probably a whole bunch of nothing but if we go back to 1958, Trujillo recruited Herminio Diaz Garcia into an assassination plot to whack Costa Rica's President Jose Figueres. It all went wrong and Diaz Garcia and his cronies were chased out through Mexico City.

The Agency would have been well aware of Diaz Garcia's Latin American exploits, and given his connections to Trafficante and hence Roselli, he would have been the right man to turn around for the Trujillo hit.

I have a single source that says Diaz Garcia was a part of an off the books Agency sponsored assassination squad called 'Los Comandos Mambises'. In mid 1963, Tony Cuesta supposedly joined their ranks. Has anyone ever come across any references to this particular group?

Any information would be appreciated. The image below shows Trujillo's car after he was whacked. BTW, this images gives us a good look at bullet holes through a windshield.

James

Edited March 13, 2005 by James Richards

[Tim Gratz]

James wrote:

The book is called 'Trujillo: The Death Of The Dictator' by Bernard Diederich.

The author of this book is an interesting person. See his website, bernarddiederich.com. He published a newspaper in Haiti for many years and has written numerous books about Central American right-wing dictators of the early sixties.

I have just sent Mr. Diederich an e-mail and hope he may respond to inquiries concerning a possible Dominican role in the Kennedy assassination.

[Tim Gratz]

Pat, I am quite certain the CIA paid for the wiretapping.

My understanding of the facts are as follows:

(1) Early October 1960 the McGuire Sisters perform on Ed Sullivan Show in NYC.

(2) That night Sammy takes Phyllis and her sisters to dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Also along is Dorothy's husband Robert Teeter.

(3) At dinner Giancana brags about his role in a plot to kill Castro. Mentions poison and a female. (Sounds like the Marita Lorenz caper.) Does not mention his partnership with the CIA.

(4) Teeter, concerned, reports the conversation to the FBI.

(5) There is an FBI report about the Giancana incident dated October 18, 1960. That same day or soon thereafter Sam Papich delivers the FBI report to the CIA.

This is of course only ten days or so before the bugging. By the way, I nam quite certain the bugging was of Dan Rowan's suite, not of McGuire.

The CIA paid for the bugging for two possible reasons: (1) to keep Sammy concentrating on killing Castro; and (2) to determine how much Giancana had told McGuire that she may have relayed to Rowan, with whom she was also romatically interested.

[Tim Gratz]

Here is an interesting quote from Mr. Diederich:

Essential to covering wars, revolutions and coups in the Caribbean, Central and South America-- I decided as a foreign correspondent whose basic job was to report-- was to carry a camera at all times. In times of crisis I felt naked without a camera.

The advantages of a reporter's carrying a camera are multiple. With a camera you get closer to the action. A cameraman often sees detail a reporter may miss. Moreover a camera can invite opportunities. A reporter with just a pen and a notebook can look ridiculous standing amidst a riot or rebellion. "CIA" the rebels shouted at one unfortunate correspondent scribbling his notes. The same rebels later happily posed with their guns in the knowledge that a picture may be a record for posterity.

No reflection on Mr. Diederich but apparently these rebels did not understand that a news reporter or photographer could be a CIA agent!

Edited March 13, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[James Richards]

Re the Trujillo assassination, I don't have the book with me but I will cite it later, in which a Trujillo military aide states that Rosselli and E. Howard Hunt were in the Dominican Republic (I think in April of 1961) and encouraging the assassination of Trujillo. (Tim Gratz)

Tim,

The information came from L. Gonzalez-Mata who was supposedly Trujillo's Chief of Security for a brief time during 1960. He claimed Hunt and Roselli were in the Dominican Republic in March of 1961.

If I remember correctly, during an interview years later, didn't Frank Sturgis also claim he was there at the time?

James

[James Richards]

A few years later a Dominican dissident named Galindez was kidnapped right off the streets of New York and murdered, and Maheu (a CIA cut-out) was tied to the plane used to fly him to Florida, and was seen in the company of Dominican intelligence officer Espailat. (Pat Speer)

Going on memory here, Tony Ulasewicz investigated the Galindez kidnapping for the NYPD. He claimed that the CIA were not involved but conceded that a rogue Intelligence operation may have been behind it.

Ulasewicz was later mixed up in Watergate. You sure have to watch out for these rogue operations.

Tony Ulasewicz below.

James

[Tim Gratz]

According to weberman, Ulasewicz did indeed investigate the Galindez kidnapping.

And I can personally confirm that Ulasewicz was involved in the Watergate matter. When I reported to a top official at CREEP that a suspicious character calling himself Don Simmons had tried to recruit me to engage in "dirty tricks" against the 1972 Democrat presidential candidates, CREEP sent Ulasewicz to Wisconsin to try to find out who this Simmons was.

It was apparently while Ulasewicz was in Wisconsin that CREEP found out that Simmons was a guy named Donald Segretti and he was being run out of Dwight Chapin's office in the White House. Ulasewicz was then ordered back to DC. (He never told me what had happened. Why he left so quickly I found out when I read his memoirs, "The President's Private Eye."

Having met Ulasewicz in 1972, I was amused to learn during the course of the Watergate investigation that he was the "bag man" delivering the "hush money" to the Watergate defendants.

[Tim Gratz]

Jumping from Ulasewicz back to Diederich:

Diederich was a correspondent for Time magazine. Here are a few of his pithy comments on his former employer:

Time was co-founded by Henry R. Luce who believed that "objectivity" in journalism is a highly relative term. Luce once declared: "When we say 'the hell with objectivity,' this is what we are talking about. It is both theoretically and practically impossible to select, recognize or organize facts without value judgments". The result was which Time called "interpretive journalism."

Sometimes that interpretation did not please the correspondents in the field. In the case of President Lyndon Johnson's sending in U.S. Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division to the Dominican in 1965 where a revolt to restore President Juan Bosch to power had broken out Time's stories weighed heavily in favor of the Johnson administration's intervention

Edited March 13, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

A few years later a Dominican dissident named Galindez was kidnapped right off the streets of New York and murdered, and Maheu (a CIA cut-out) was tied to the plane used to fly him to Florida, and was seen in the company of Dominican intelligence officer Espailat. (Pat Speer)

Going on memory here, Tony Ulasewicz investigated the Galindez kidnapping for the NYPD. He claimed that the CIA were not involved but conceded that a rogue Intelligence operation may have been behind it. (James Richards.)

There is a movie about the Galindez kidnapping and murder. Below is a link to information on the movie from the imdb web-site:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347037/

A brief excerpt from that web-site:

Jesus de Galindez was a Basque nationalist who lived in the Dominican Republic after leaving Spain. And then after leaving the Dominican Republic for the United States he wrote a book exposing the Trujillo dicatorship. For this he was kidnapped and taken to the Dominican Republic where he was brutal tortured and killed.

The movie uncovers his life through the oddysey of a young woman from the United States who does research on his life, only to find doors blocked everywhere, and false open doors as well. Harvey Keitel plays the US government agent (it's unclear if CIA or FBI) whose assignment is to prevent the facts about Washington's role in the disappearance of Galindez from coming out. Keitel plays this role to a T.

Edited March 13, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Pat Speer]

Pat, I am quite certain the CIA paid for the wiretapping.

My understanding of the facts are as follows:

(1)  Early October 1960 the McGuire Sisters perform on Ed Sullivan Show in NYC.

(2)  That night Sammy takes Phyllis and her sisters to dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Manhattan.  Also along is Dorothy's husband Robert Teeter.

(3)  At dinner Giancana brags about his role in a plot to kill Castro.  Mentions poison and a female.  (Sounds like the Marita Lorenz caper.)  Does not mention his partnership with the CIA.

(4)  Teeter, concerned, reports the conversation to the FBI.

(5)  There is an FBI report about the Giancana incident dated October 18, 1960.  That same day or soon thereafter Sam Papich delivers the FBI report to the CIA.

This is of course only ten days or so before the bugging.  By the way, I nam quite certain the bugging was of Dan Rowan's suite, not of McGuire.

The CIA paid for the bugging for two possible reasons: (1) to keep Sammy concentrating on killing Castro; and (2) to determine how much Giancana had told McGuire that she may have relayed to Rowan, with whom she was also romatically interested.

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The FBI report is indeed interesting, in that, according to the IG report, the pills were not passed to Maheu and Rosselli until early the next year. This makes me believe that the Sturgis/Lorenz attempt on Castro was done on behalf of Lansky, in an attempt to cash in on the reported 1 million dollar bounty on Castro's head. I believe the Maheu/Rosselli attempts were designed to cash in on the same bounty, but with CIA funding. In Maheu's book he brags about how he got Nixon and the CIA to pay for an operation he'd already started on behalf of a client, Stavros Niarchos. The mission: disrupt and squelch an oil deal between Ari Onassis and the Saudi Government. It makes sense that Rosselli, whose business card said "strategist," convinced his friends Momo, Carlos and Santos, that he could not only whack Castro, but get the ÇIA to pay for it. His friendship with Maheu, courtesy Edward bennett Williams, may have convinced him he could pull this off. By the way, no one seems to remember who first raised the idea of using the mob; it could certainly be that Maheu put the idea into O'Connell's ear and O'Connell put the idea in Edwards' ear; it certainly didn't start with Bissell. This is all conjecture of course, but conjecture that takes into account the weight of the evidence and the personalities of those involved.

I believe your statement that the CIA paid for the bugging is misleading in that Maheu paid for it out of expense money previously given to him by the CIA for the assassination. There was no approval of the bugging by the CIA before the bugging took place--the only one to ever say so was Maheu and he changed his story multiple times, sometimes he said that the bugging was necessary in order to keep Sam in Florida (which is nonsense because Giancana did almost nothing) and sometimes he said that it was necessary because Phyllis may have been talking. I urge you to read Maheu's Church Committee testimony and compare it to his book; you should also read O'Connell's, Morgan's, Rosselli's, and Edwards' collective testimony and statements. If you do you'll see that Maheu is the least credible of all. I suspect he's pathological.

[Tim Gratz]

Gerry Hemming knew Johnny Abbes Garcia, so his contention that Ramfis Trujillo and Johnny Abbes Garcia helped fund the assassination may be based on some personal knowledge.

"HEMMING first met "Colonel Alberto Bayo" (Eduardo Perez Gonzalez) in early 1960. He and Howard Kenneth Davis introduced Bayo to Johnny Abbes who had lost his lucrative job upon Trujillo's death, and was plotting with a group of Haitian exiles to put together one of their periodic attempts to overthrow Duvalier. Realizing that the Haitians involved were short on military training, not to mention combat experience, Abbes was looking for some kind of commando group to bolster the eager but amateur Haitians. Bayo met with Abbes several times and Abbes was impressed. HEMMING related: 'In fact the two of them signed a formal agreement in Abbes living room that stated in return for helping overthrow Duvalier, the new Haitian regime would grant the Cubans bases from which they could operate against Castro.'"(From ajweberman Nodule 10.)