All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Read online

  This new position came without a standard job description and list of duties written down in black and white; no problem, I just jumped in with both feet when I walked into my new office in the basement and discovered four cardboard boxes filled with papers, some of them handwritten, sitting in the middle of the floor, having been delivered on the Attorney General’s order the night before. These boxes came with the request that a report on their contents be ready for the President no later than 2:00 p.m. The first thing I picked up was from Paris Stafford, an old Harvard classmate of the President’s who owned a dozen car dealerships, and who did a large amount of business in Europe, some of it on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where there was a small, but lucrative, market for American-made farm equipment. There were other opportunities as well, for it seemed there were members of the Soviet elite who had an appetite for the finer things of American life like Hi-Fi stereos, Coca-Cola, bedroom furniture, Kentucky Bourbon, paperback novels and Playboy magazine - all of which came into the Worker’s Paradise by way of crates marked Medical Supplies and shipped from Stafford’s warehouse in Atlanta, Georgia. All of this was kept far from Khrushchev’s eyes and those of the more orthodox Marxists in the Kremlin, who had no idea how many of their comrades were enjoying the evil fruits of capitalism. The Russian end was handled by Vladimir Roykov, the #2 man to Leonid Brezhnev, a high-ranking member of the Politburo, who was fattening his wallet every time a crate from Stafford off-loaded at the airport in Moscow and passed through customs without being inspected. By the fall of 1963, they were working on a deal by which certain Soviet bigwigs could indulge their passion for high-end Ford and Chevy automobiles while keeping fat old Nikita in the dark about it.

  Stafford found a reason to fly to Moscow at least once a month, always meeting Roykov while he was there; and as soon as he got back stateside, a detailed hand written note on what he‘d learned while there would be delivered to the President’s desk. Most of what was in those notes could be called gossip, but after reading a half dozen of them, it was crystal clear much of it was better than anything the CIA station chief in Moscow reported. Now I had a year’s worth of such reports to read over and see if I could find anything in retrospect which might lead back to Oswald.

  Gillison’s people went to work on Stafford’s not always legible notes and after three hours could not ascertain anything which might point to a Soviet government conspiracy to assassinate the President in Dallas, but I give Colonel Gillison credit for pointing out something no one else in the intelligence services had yet learned: Khrushchev’s hold on power in the Kremlin might not be quite so secure. The Colonel drew our attention to how many times during Stafford’s visits to Moscow, the Supreme leader was on “vacation” at a spa on the Black Sea according to his best buddy Roykov. And while the cat was away, certain members of the Politburo got together and showed off their latest bourgeoisie acquisitions. “Put all those Red Russian bastards together,” he said, Marlboro dangling from his lips, “and they can’t help but plot to stick the knife in someone‘s back, it’s in their blood.”

  I handed the Attorney General the report at 1:00 p.m. sharp (a good hour ahead of deadline) and made sure it highlighted the opinion on Khrushchev’s future possible continued employment. This is what got me called into a meeting with President Kennedy later in the afternoon. This time there was only two of us in the Oval Office. “How sure are you about this conclusion, Colonel?” the President asked. “The CIA people in Moscow tell me the exact opposite.” He was sitting in a rocking chair; the man suffered from back pain something awful.

  “Sir, I am quite confident of my conclusion; so too is Colonel Gillison and the rest of my people. This, of course, is based on the reports Mr. Stafford submitted.” Stand firm and hedge your bets at the same time, a technique every middleman has to learn.

  The President stroked his chin, looked down at my report in his hand, then said, “This is a bombshell if it is true; if you had to Colonel, would you be able to stand up in a meeting and argue with Director McCone, who would tell you otherwise?”

  “Yes I would, Mr. President; I’m not afraid to take fire, even from my own side.” That is exactly what I remember myself saying in response to the President.

  He tossed my report on his desk and got to his feet, but not without the barest of a wince on his face. “Good enough, Colonel, and good job too. I’ll tell the Attorney General to make available to your group everything we keep under lock and key on the Soviets, Cuba Vietnam the Middle East and Europe. My good friend, Paris, is only the tip of the iceberg, because there are many things we need to know that others don’t want us to learn. Earn your pay and find something else valuable.”

  Well, I found out what “tip of the iceberg” meant in the next few days as my group and I were inundated in our offices with boxes filled with folders, many of them containing pages of barely legible handwriting, while others were neatly typed transcripts of telephone conversations where both parties clearly did not know they were being bugged. The source of all this raw intelligence was a motley collection of sources: A Canadian businessman who regularly traveled to Cuba and often had drinks with Che Guevara; a Swedish pharmaceutical salesman who worked out of Hong Kong and did business all over Asia, including Red China; a retired British naval officer (who had met the President when both of them served in the Pacific) who now ran an airline whose territory included West Africa and a good part of Arabia; a Los Angeles construction company owner who made a lots of money under the table selling guns to anyone anywhere on earth; the long, long time mistress of a Greek shipping tycoon who entertained on a regular business major European political leaders; and many others with similar backgrounds. All of them knew the Kennedy family through business with the father, or went to the same schools with the sons or served in the military with them.

  The other thing they had in common was that this diverse group could go places and gain the kind of access the CIA could not pull off on their best day. The difference between their intelligence and what Langley and the Pentagon put out was striking. “Salesman and whores,” Colonel Gillison observed at one point, “know everything worth knowing.”

  While me and my group was sifting though barely legible notes and transcripts of telephone conversations, the investigation into the assassination attempt in Dallas continued, but without much success in locating Lee Harvey Oswald’s accomplices. Despite my heavy work-load I followed the story in the press, reading every byline in the Post, and devouring each issue of Time, Newsweek and Life, rereading some stories multiple times. Everyone was focusing on Oswald’s past, every night Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley led their newscasts with videotape of different associates of his being led through a gauntlet of reporters in Dallas to be questioned by the FBI and the Dallas PD, including Marinna, Oswald’s Russian wife, who was reportedly kept in an interrogation room for 18 hours straight in an obvious attempt to break her down. Then there were rumors of witnesses to the attempted assassination and friends of Oswald being whisked away to a secure army base somewhere in Texas to keep them safe. There was constant talk of a suspect who was about to spill their guts and break the whole conspiracy wide open at any moment.

  During this time I only saw the President a few fleeting times and then at a distance as he came and went from the White House; the whole First Family spent an extended weekend on Cape Cod for Thanksgiving 1963 - I can only imagine how much the man must have cherished his time with his wife and children after such a close call. I know how he felt: there is a reason our first child was born exactly nine and half months after I got home from Korea. The President adamantly refused to publicly comment on Dallas, Oswald, or the investigation.

  “I am most grateful that some people’s reach far exceeds their grasp.” It was all he said publicly before the reporters, a remark everyone remembers, but it struck me at the time that Oswald was not a poor shot at all, he was a well trained Marine who knew how to hit what he aimed at; the reason John F. Kennedy was st
ill alive was because somebody had snitched on the man who’d pulled the trigger from the sixth floor window. The only sign that things had changed was the doubling of agents on the secret service detail when the President made a public appearance.

  On Wednesday, December 11th, I was called over to the West Wing by the Attorney General who wanted to ask me some specific questions concerning a Russian rifle company which supposedly had been helping Communist guerrillas in the Belgian Congo, but had vanished from the fighting in early November. A witness had told one of the President’s sources the Russian soldiers had flown west not east when they left the Congo. We had a quick and very on point conversation in the hallway outside the Oval Office, one where I was on the receiving end of one of Robert Kennedy’s mini-inquisitions, something I learned to take in stride as just coming with the job.

  Our exchange ended abruptly when J. Edgar Hoover himself strode down the hall, wearing the darkest business suite I’d ever seen and trailed by a pair of faithful agents, brylcream glistening from their hair and toting briefcases; this myth in the flesh neither looked left nor right nor acknowledged anyone except the Attorney General, who was actually the Director’s boss same as myself, only Hoover greeted our mutual superior with the merest of nods and a polite “Bobby,” a greeting I could never possibly imagine any other subordinate giving the Attorney General; then again, what other subordinate was thirty years Robert F. Kennedy’s senior and a living legend. The Director’s manner was no different than if he had been busting a speakeasy during Prohibition instead of meeting the President.

  Only when I was heading back to my office did I realize Hoover’s greeting to the Attorney General reeked of barely concealed disdain; an interesting look at office politics on a level far above my pay grade.

  It wasn’t until the afternoon that I learned the reason for the FBI Director’s visit to the Oval Office.

  At three o’clock central time a news conference was called in Texas by James Hosty, the FBI agent in charge of the Oswald investigation and Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas PD, where they jointly disclosed the discovery of a rented locker at a bus station within a short walking distance of Dealy Plaza, the contents of said rented locker being a .38 Special, fifteen thousand in cash - mostly dominations of twenty - and a fake passport bearing a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald above the alias of Oliver Howard Lee. What would be known as the smoking gun was the identity of the person who’d rented the locker: Armando Vargas, a Mexican national who was known to the FBI as being in the employ of Cuban Intelligence, who had paid for the locker on Wednesday, November 20th. Vargas’s current whereabouts were unknown, but what was known was that Vargas, an associate of his named Hector Bermudez, and a third person of interest, Gilberto Lopez, had crossed the border from Texas into Mexico on Saturday, November 23rd.

  Upon hearing this last bit of information, I remembered those two extra planes which flew from Havana to Mexico City on the afternoon of the 22nd of November. Were they to be the means of escape to Cuba for Oswald and the others? All I knew for sure was that all hell was about to break loose.

  The three men - Vargas, Bermudez, and Lopez - immediately became the most wanted men on the planet, even though all they were technically wanted for was questioning in the attempted assassination of President Kennedy. Since it was an ongoing investigation, the Administration would have no comment or take any action until the full and thorough investigation by the appropriate branches of law enforcement were concluded. Those were the exact words of the Attorney General to the press.

  What was also clear on Wednesday, December 11th, was that the conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States ran from Dallas to Mexico to Havana.

  The next day, the Attorney General came down and spoke to us in the White House basement. “Colonel Maddox,” he said, “I think it is now abundantly clear that the Castro government is at war with the United States - that is what those shots in Dallas constituted: an act of war.” As of yet, it was not a full out shooting war between opposing armed forces on the field, but hostilities had commenced just the same. It was not a conflict fought all out like World War II, not in the nuclear age, not with Castro cradled in the full embrace of Khrushchev and all the military might of the Soviet Union, but it was still a war America was going to find a way to win nevertheless. Our key to victory would come from intelligence, of knowing what was going on behind the closed doors in Havana and the Kremlin. My group had proven themselves by coming together and accomplishing a lot in a short time, and the President would need us because we were independent. “The Pentagon and State Department are full of career paper pushers who could do the work you are doing, but their priority, no matter what the circumstances, is to cover their own Goddamn asses and make the Agency or the service look good; they did that at the Bay of Pigs, the whole lot of them and my brother learned his lesson: Don‘t make the same mistake again. Go outside the chain of command; get your own people who answer only to you.”

  It made me proud to hear those words of praise from the President’s own brother.

  Then the Attorney General warned that some of the intelligence we would be dealing with came from ultra-covert operations. “Black bag doesn’t even begin to cover it.” The what’s, why’s, and wherefore’s of all this could potentially cause quite an embarrassment if it were to become public, not to say giving great aid and comfort to the enemies of this country, a country I have taken an oath to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It should have gone without saying, but my boss was taking the time to remind me: I was an officer in the United States Marine Corp; I would salute, obey orders without question, and as for any personal qualms - flush them down the toilet.

  “Sir,” I answered Bobby Kennedy, “if you need a Marine to march into Havana and nail Castro’s ass, then I am your Marine.” For better or for worse, I just made a total commitment.

  Things moved fast after that; by order of the President himself, we were to do a critical analysis of our defensive and offensive strategy for the western hemisphere. Why? We’d find out.

  Within days we were receiving briefings from the CIA along with reports marked Top Secret; we also had two Generals, Alvin Miller from the Southern Command and Walter Justin, who had just returned from a year and a half in Brussels, come in and give us detailed looks at the operations and contingency plans for any number of scenarios for if and when hostilities were to break out between the United States and the Soviet Union. Admiral Eugene Thompson, from the Atlantic Fleet, gave us the rundown on how much firepower the Navy had in case of war, and how it would be deployed and used. I can tell you it was heady stuff for me when these men with the gold braid on their dress uniforms - not to mention the medals earned in World War II - sat across an Oak table and answered my questions. I’ll tell you there was more than a little glaring and glowering at me, but they had been ordered to be there by the President, so they had to like it or lump it.

  “What Class were you at Annapolis, Colonel?” Admiral Thompson asked as he got up to leave.

  “Class of 1949, Sir!”

  “So I guess you were still in high school when I was watching the Japs surrender on the deck of the Missouri? Missed the whole damn war, didn’t you, Colonel? ”

  “Yes, sir.” But I made it to Korea in time to freeze my ass off at the Chosin Reservoir, Sir!”

  The Admiral gave me a steely look, and then he returned my salute and left without another word.

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” Colonel Gillison said as soon as Admiral Thompson was out of earshot. “You’re on his shit list now for sure.”

  I couldn’t have cared less; I was working for the men who outranked all the Admirals in all of the United States Navy.

  The holiday season was spent working on the “critical analysis” of our Operation Plans for the Southern Command and the Atlantic Fleet. Although we hadn’t been told why we were doing this work, it did not escape our notice that Cuba, along with the rest of the Caribbean, fell w
ithin the area of responsibility for both of those commands.

  While this was going inside our basement office, the search was on for the three men - Vargas, Bermudez and Lopez - wanted for questioning in the assassination attempt; the trail led into Mexico and there it went cold, but much attention was directed at those flights between Mexico City and Havana on November 22nd; that the three men were now in Cuba was a given as far as most Americans were concerned. Meanwhile, the investigations in Texas continued right into 1964 with no new bombshells, while the President and the First Family spent Christmas at Palm Beach in Florida, making no public statements on anything having to do with the events in Dallas or its aftermath. There was a front page photo on every major newspaper showing the President walking on the beach on Christmas day, hand in hand with his two children - a poignant reminder to everyone of what might not have been.

  Some miles to the south, in Havana, Castro was not silent in the face of all the accusations directed at him and his dictatorship: “The Yankee Imperialists are liars to their core,” he said in a three-hour speech on Christmas Eve of ‘63. “They fabricate evidence and libel the Revolution, but they are the ones with blood on their hands. They are the ones who plot murder behind closed doors.” At the time, we thought it was nothing but bluster.

  I would learn different in the first week of 1964, when a call from the Attorney General informed me that my group would be receiving a verbal briefing from an individual the next day and we had better take good notes, because much of what he had to tell us was of the highest level of confidentiality; that is how it came to be that on January 5th, we were graced with the presence of Harmon Butler, whose official title was assistant to the CIA station chief in Miami. Despite his job title, Butler was quick to imply that his real duties put him far out in the field and in harm‘s way. My impression of Mr. Butler was that of a real junior James Bond, the kind of guy who thought he could pull off wearing Ray Bans after dark. He didn’t help himself when he said it was the first time he’d been inside “the building where they screwed up the Bay of Pigs.”