The truth about George Joannides and the CIA’s fight to hide it

First, a brief word of apology to Jefferson Morley, whose excellent and meticulously researched book, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA was first mentioned here almost exactly one year ago, with the promise of a review to come…like so many other worthy projects, the review ended up on the back burner (the saltmine beckons and is unusually active at present), but it has not been forgotten. In the meantime, Machetera will say this: the book is terrific – engagingly written, carefully corroborated, it is a must-read for anyone curious about the CIA’s long reach in Mexico, particularly during the period in the fall of 1963 when the CIA did and then didn’t know about Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in his failed search for a Cuban visa. So get the book, now.

Second, José Pertierra has just published an exclusive interview with Morley at Cubadebate. Normally Machetera resists translating articles written by those with a perfect grasp of English, such as that possessed by Pertierra, not least because translation is invariably an imperfect art and she dislikes second-guessing an interview that undoubtedly transpired in English to begin with. But this interview is exceptionally interesting and important, and as yet, no English version has appeared. So in the meantime, with additional apologies to Morley, and to Pertierra, here it is. A bit of a filmed interview with Morley follows the interview.

Jeff Morley: “I’m only asking that the CIA obey the law” - Español

José Pertierra for Cubadebate

English translation: Machetera

Washington – The day that his brother was assassinated, the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, spoke by telephone with one of the leaders of the terrorist campaign against Cuba, Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams. Kennedy said to him directly: “One of your men did it.” Bobby Kennedy didn’t ask him. He told him. It came from his gut, because he knew those people. That’s how the journalist/researcher Jefferson Morley tells it in an interview he granted Cubadebate.

“The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 and the dirty war against Cuba organized by the Miami Cubans are intimately linked: they’re battles in the same war, “ said Morley.

“The anecdote about the conversation between Bobby Kennedy and Ruiz-Williams is well founded,” says Morley, “because the prestigious journalist Haynes Johnson was a witness. He was with Ruiz-Williams during the conversation with Kennedy.”

Jefferson Morley has a long career as a well-known journalist in Washington. He worked for 15 years for the Washington Post and has also been published in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, the New Republic, Slate, Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times. Recently, he published a biography of the CIA station chief in Mexico, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Six years ago he filed suit (Morley v. CIA) against the CIA in order to force the Central Intelligence Agency to declassify documents dating from the period between 1962 and 1964, relative to George E. Joannides, a CIA official charged with many of the operations against Cuba in that period. On November 16^th, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., will hold a hearing to listen to the arguments of both Morley and the CIA about the possible declassification of these documents.

José Pertierra: Why do you believe the CIA wishes to keep nearly 50 year old documents secret?

Jefferson Morley: Because they may contain something delicate or embarrassing for the CIA. The story that we’re told about Joannides is a show. A lie. According to his own documents which I’ve gone over personally, the story that the CIA tells us now about Joannides doesn’t match reality. The Agency tries to trivialize Joannides’ role in the operations that took place between 1962 and 1964, but history shows us the truth. Furthermore, if the documents being hidden truly do not incriminate the CIA, why do they want them to be hidden? Could it be because Kennedy was killed in 1963? That conditioned reflex to keep this secret hides something.

JP: Who was George E. Joannides?

JM: He was a CIA man whose assignment was to control and direct the Miami Cubans who were in charge of the operations against Cuba at the beginning of the 1960’s. Specifically, he was charged with controlling the Directorio Revolucionario Esudiantil (DRE) [Revolutionary Student Directorate]. The CIA commended him in 1963 for his good work directing the DRE. After the missile crisis in October of 1962, Washington wanted to “reign in” the DRE’s activities, and the CIA put Joannides in charge of that assignment. When the CIA gave him his evaluation in August of 1963, he was congratulated for having “controlled” the DRE.

JP: Who was the DRE?

JM: It was a Cuban organization headquartered in Miami. A CIA analyst told me that the DRE came to be “the most militant of the Miami exile organizations at the beginning of the 1960’s.”

Its leaders were Alberto Muller, Ernesto Travieso and Juan Manual Salvat. Salvat later started a bookstore on Miami’s Calle Ocho, called the Librería Universal [Universal Library]. One of its militants was the young Jorge Mas Canosa, who would later go on to found the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). The DRE operated from Miami under the direction of a couple of important CIA officers: David Phillips and Howard Hunt.

One of their most well-known violent operations against Cuba took place in August of 1962, when Salvat and a group of DRE militants headed to Cuba from Miami in a small boat and attacked the Hotel Rosita de Hornedo, known after the revolution as the Hotel Sierra Maestra, in Miramar (Havana), at midnight. They attacked the hotel with a cannon, terrorized the guests, and fled. Among the DRE militants who attacked the hotel that night was José Basulto, who would go on to found the Brothers to the Rescue organization in 1995. Basulto told me personally that he was the one who purchased and shot the cannon that was used to attack the Hotel Sierra Maestra that night. He said that he’d bought it in a Miami pawnshop.

(Translator’s note: Morley repudiates the word “terrorized” as it is attributed to him.)

In August of 1963, members of the DRE in New Orleans had a series of encounters with Lee Harvey Oswald. After the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the members of the DRE spread a publicity campaign to insinuate that Castro had assassinated Kennedy, because Oswald was supposedly affiliated with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

JP: George E. Joannides’ official assignment was “Head of psychological warfare for JMWAVE.” What were his responsibilities?

JM: The plan was to affect the psychology of the enemy. To change their perceptions of reality in order to bring about a change in government. The best example is that of Guatemala in 1954, when the CIA orchestrated false news bulletins about an opposition to the Arbenz government, in the Guatemalan jungle. In the end, Arbenz confused fiction for reality and panic set in. Something that never happened to Fidel Castro or Che Guevara. They understood very well the difference between the fiction of psychological war, and reality.

Joannides paid the members of the DRE. He gave them a lot of money. We know that they received $50,000 a month. In today’s currency that’s more than $150,000. It was a lot of money. He was Washington’s man in Miami in charge of the DRE.

The DRE members at that time were the CIA’s favorite Cubans. Under Joannides’ direction, the DRE had four specific tasks:

1. Political action against Cuba.
2. Acquisition of intelligence against Cuba.
3. Distribution of propaganda against Cuba.
4. Distribution of its actions and propaganda toward Latin America.

JP: What is the connection between Lee Harvey Oswald, the individual who is said to have assassinated President Kennedy in November of 1963, and the DRE? What might the CIA documents tell us about that?

JM: Four months before President Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald and members of the DRE met several times in New Orleans. They had an altercation with him in the street. The DRE sent a member to his house, making him seem like a follower of Fidel. They debated about this on the radio and sent the tape of the debate to Joannides; they even wrote to Congress asking for an investigation of Oswald who at that point in time was an innocuous person. You have to remember that at that time, the DRE had specific instructions to ask for the CIA’s authorization before making any kind of public declaration.

Scarcely an hour after Oswald’s arrest on November 22^nd, the DRE leaders published the documentation they’d accumulated against Oswald and in this way influenced the coverage of the assassination by insinuating that a Castro agent had killed the President of the United States.

The Warren Commission, who investigated the assassination, never realized the connection between Joannides’ employees in the DRE and Oswald. Even in 1978, when the House of Representatives Committee on Assassinations hired Joannides as an advisor to its investigation, Joannides didn’t inform the Committee about his role in the events of 1963 and the DRE.

The attorney for the House Committee, Bob Blakey, says that Joannides obstructed the investigation by not divulging the role he played with the DRE.

JP: What are you asking of the CIA with this suit you filed in December of 2003?

JM: I’m only asking that the CIA obey the law. The CIA has told me that it has more than 295 documents that it will not release for reasons of national security. The documents I have show that Joannides traveled to New Orleans to complete tasks that the CIA charged him with in 1963 and 1964. [They show] that the CIA entrusted him with delicate operations throughout 1962-64. We don’t have any information about those operations. Joannides can’t tell us, because he died in 2001. Those are the only documents about what he did in that city with the DRE members. The CIA has the legal obligation to declassify those documents, but it does not want to declassify them. It’s locked them up. I believe that the lockup sources from the CIA department in charge of Latin America. They are hiding something. The CIA tells us that Joannides had nothing to do with the DRE. I know that’s not true. The documents I have in my possession prove that indeed there was that relationship. Why do they make these statements that are so openly false? What are they hiding?

I hope that on November 16^th, Judge Richard J. Leon will support my motion to have the CIA declassify these documents, so that they may be studied. This is the only way for us to know what really happened in those two mysterious CIA operations in which Joannides worked in 1963 and 1964.

JP: The CIA says that if these documents are declassified, the national security of the United States will be endangered. Do you know what the danger is?

JM: There’s no danger. Washington has a mistaken perception about what is truly national security. I’m told that they cannot declassify nearly 50 year old documents for reasons of national security. That’s not true.

I don’t know who killed Kennedy, I don’t pretend to know. What I’m asking is that these documents be declassified which have to do with George E. Joannides during 1962 and 1964, in order to clarify the facts. This is not a threat to the country, and the Freedom of Information Act says that they must be declassified. I am only asking that the CIA obey the law.

Machetera is a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translator are cited.

Infiltrating Alpha 66 By SAUL LANDAU

Infiltrating Alpha 66

An Interview with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuban Five

By SAUL LANDAU

This conversation took place on April 1, 2009. Our film crew received Justice Department approval to talk with “the prisoner,” with a prison official in the room. Before his 1998 arrest, Gerardo Hernandez directed the operations of the other Cuban State Security agents who infiltrated violent groups in the Miami area for the purposes of stopping them from carrying our terrorist attacks on tourist sites in Cuba. We took complete and careful notes.

Saul Landau: What was your mission and why?

Gerardo Hernandez: In the US in general and Florida specifically, many groups contemplated and carried out acts of terrorism in Cuba. We were collecting information on Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue. Many years have passed and I hope that nothing has escaped me but I think those were the principal groups in which we working [infiltrating].

SL: What did you learn through your infiltration?

GH: The first thing that struck me was the impunity with which these groups operated, violating the laws of the US: The Neutrality Acts [of the 1790s] that supposedly means no organization can use American soil to commit terrorism against another country.

In the case of Alpha 66, the operatives would take a fast boat and shoot at targets along Cuba’s coast. When they would return to Miami, they would hold a press conference lecture and openly say what they had done.

And when someone would ask, “Hey, doesn’t that violate the neutrality laws,” they would reply: “Not really, because first we went to one of the Keys somewhere in the Caribbean and then we went to Cuba. So technically, we didn’t leave from the US.” They did this openly and no US agency took responsibility.

SL: In what years?

GH: This has been going on since 1959. I personally began dealing with this in the 1990s. Since I’ve been here in prison in Victorville [California] about 3 years ago, I think in 2005 they arrested a Cuban right here in this county with an arsenal, all kinds of weapons in his house. And the first thing he said was, “Well, I am a member of Alpha 66 and I’m using these weapons in the struggle for Cuban freedom.” That was his defense.

SL: Were the Cuban Five all volunteers? How does one prepare to infiltrate an enemy group in an enemy country? And then act as if you were enemies of your country and friends of them?

GH: Yes, all volunteers. In my case, I’m not a career military man. I studied to be a diplomat. It took me 6 years to complete my degree in International and Political Relations. Afterwards, I went to Angola, as part of a voluntary international mission. And while I was in Angola it seems I sparked the attention of the Cuban intelligence services, and when I got back, they approached me with this mission. They said, “We know you studied to be a diplomat, but you know our country has a certain situation with these terrorist groups that are coming from Florida to commit all kinds of crimes and we need someone to go and fulfill these tasks.”

I could have said “No, I studied diplomacy, I want to be a diplomat,” but Cubans, those who were raised with the Revolution, know that during the past 50 years our country has faced almost a war environment. In Cuba, he who doesn’t know personally a victim of terrorism, at least knows about the plane that exploded over Barbados, killing 73 people [October 1976]. Who doesn’t know about the bomb [in 1997] that killed Fabio di Selmo [an Italian tourist and guest at Havana’s Hotel Copacabana detonated by a Salvadoran who said he was hired by Luis Posada ] just to mention a few acts? There was a pre-school where the counter revolutionaries lit a [gas] tank on fire. These actions are part of the Cuban conscience. So, I told the Intelligence officers, “Yes, I am prepared to fulfill this mission.”

SL: How did you manage to infiltrate these groups? How did you convince them, people like Jose Basulto [head of Brothers to the Rescue], for example?

GH: For Cubans in this country, everything is connected. Cubans in the United States have enormous privileges, ones that no other citizens of the world have. Cubans arrive by any route, including with false passports, and the only thing they have to say is, “I come seeking freedom,” and right away the US gives them all the documents they need. So, in the case of Basulto, for example, one of our comrades who infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue had originally “stolen” a plane from Cuba. Rene [Gonzalez, another of the Cuban Five] flew his plane here and, as is the custom, he was received as a hero. He got lots of attention and, later joined the Brothers. His job was collecting information about that organization.

So, if you ask me how, I say that we used as our foundation for infiltration the very privileges all Cubans receive when they arrive in this country; even those who took others with them, and have hijacked airplanes, or have put a gun up to a pilot’s head. Look at people like Leonel Matias, who [in 1994 he hijacked a boat in Cuba and killed a naval officer in the process] killed someone on a boat, arrived here on that boat, with his gun -- and the body was even discovered. But despite all of that, he didn’t have to face any processes in the U.S. justice system. Those people are automatically pardoned. So using exactly that kind of advantage, we were able to penetrate to a certain level, these organizations.

When I mention Brothers to the Rescue, some might think, “This is a humanitarian organization that rescued balseros [rafters].” On the contrary, while their activities were limited to rescuing balseros, they had no problems with the Cuban authorities. What people tend not know is that Jose Basulto, the head of that organization, has a long record as a terrorist. He trained with the CIA, and infiltrated Cuba in the 1960s. In 1962, he came to Cuba on a fast boat and fired shells at the Cuban coast, including targeting a hotel. Even Basulto, with all his known history, had no problems while he limited his actions to rescuing balseros. In 1995, however, the United States and Cuba signed migratory agreements specifying that boats intercepted at sea would no longer be brought to the United States; rather they would be returned to Cuba. At that point, people stopped contributing money to Basulto and his organization because, they said: “Why are we going to give money to Basulto’s organization? When he calls the coast guard, they are just going to return those balseros to Cuba?”

So, when Basulto saw his business in danger, he invented this invasion [in 1995] of Cuban airspace as a way to keep people donating money. We presented this evidence in our case. If the press hasn’t wanted to pay much attention to this…well, they don’t want to touch such material. It doesn’t behoove them. I am referring to the corporate press. The documents are all there showing how Basulto and the Brothers to the Rescue were trying out handmade weapons in order to introduce them in Cuba.

When Basulto testified at our trial [2001], our attorneys asked him what he intended to do with all those weapons. All this is in the trial record, though no one seems to want to pay attention to it. People tend to talk about the Brothers to the Rescue as if they were a humanitarian organization, omitting the part about terrorism; like they omit the facts that the FBI had penetrated that organization as well. The FBI had someone inside the group giving them information on the Brothers’ activities. Why would the FBI penetrate a humanitarian organization?

Saul Landau is currently making (with Jack Willis) a film on the Cuban Five. His other films are available on DVD from roundworldproductions@gmail.com. He is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and autho of A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD (Counterpunch A/K).