Legacy of Secrecy Read Online Free

assassination, spawning a legacy of secrecy
    that would lead to more deaths and impact presidents, Congress, and
    US foreign policy for the next forty-five years.
    Important files that have been declassified in recent years, coupled
    with new disclosures from two dozen Kennedy associates, allow the
    story to be detailed for the first time. They allow us to chronicle the
    secret investigations into JFK’s death undertaken by Robert Kennedy
    and others, which had to be conducted covertly to avoid exposing the
    JFK-Almeida coup plan and other intelligence operations. CIA officials,
    such as Richard Helms, had to protect not only legitimate covert opera-
    tions, but also unauthorized schemes withheld from the Kennedys and
    Helms’s own CIA Director, like the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro.
    New revelations about John and Robert Kennedy, the CIA, the Mafia,
    and Cuba cast the aftermath of JFK’s death in a whole new light. This
    new information shows who was actively involved in JFK’s murder,
    who was covering up to protect their reputation, who was protecting
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    LEGACY OF SECRECY
    national security, and who was really trying to solve the assassination.
    The information that Robert Kennedy and other officials decided to
    reveal, or not to reveal, would generate much of the controversy sur-
    rounding the JFK assassination that persists even today. The decisions
    they made on November 22, 1963, are why “well over a million CIA
    records” remain classified today, sixteen years after Congress unani-
    mously passed a law requiring their release.1
    To understand their actions, it’s important to look first at what the
    key players had been doing in the weeks and months leading up to
    JFK’s assassination. Much of the following is from the thousands of
    pages of formerly secret government files that were not available to the
    Warren Commission or the Congressional investigations of the 1970s,
    ’80s, and ’90s.
    In 1963, the second most powerful man in America was the President’s
    brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Bobby, as he liked to be
    called by friends and associates, was far more than the nation’s top law
    enforcement official. As the President’s closest confidant and protector,
    Bobby advised JFK on most important official, political, and personal
    issues. Not yet the almost saintly idealist some would say he became
    before his own assassination, the Bobby of 1963 could be brash and
    cocky, a tough adversary. Acutely aware of the way government, the
    media, and big business really worked, he constantly tried—often with
    success—to get what he and JFK wanted. Yet he also inspired fierce loy-
    alty from those who worked for him, who saw in him a determination
    to make America and the world a better place.
    Bobby’s path to becoming Attorney General was part of JFK’s path
    to the presidency. In 1958, Senator John F. Kennedy started laying the
    groundwork for his presidential run by becoming the most publicized
    member of a Senate committee investigating the Teamsters and orga-
    nized crime. Bobby, the committee’s chief counsel, did much of the
    actual grilling of Mafia bosses and their associates, such as Jimmy Hoffa.
    Rumors about Mafia ties and Prohibition-era bootlegging had long
    dogged their father, Joseph Kennedy, one of America’s wealthiest men,
    and going after mob bosses so aggressively was one way for JFK and
    Bobby to neutralize that issue. The crime hearings had become a mat-
    ter of national urgency because the Mafia’s power had grown tremen-
    dously during the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower and
    Vice President Richard Nixon. Nixon’s early ties to the Mafia have been
    extensively documented, most recently by author Anthony Summers.

Chapter One
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    His best-selling book about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Official and
    Confidential, makes a persuasive case that Hoover’s soft treatment of the
    Mafia (Hoover denied the very existence of the Mafia for years)