The Death of Dorothy Hunt: Probing the Assassination of JFK, Part 5

Frank Sturgis answered her story by stating he had never met Oswald. Fonzi eventually claimed that the Lorenz story was disinformation intended to send the committee in a direction away from Hunt and the real action. There was no doubt that she had been Castro’s mistress or that she joined the agency in 1959 and later carried out two dangerous missions in Cuba. Her story was probably a CIA effort to mislead, but the usual formula for its disinformation is to include a great deal of true information with lies intended to misdirect. If that were the case, it can be assumed that the agency wanted to place Hunt somewhere other than Dallas on November 22.


In American Spy, Hunt’s memoir, Hunt speculated that LBJ was behind the murder of JFK. Hunt speculated that William K. Harvey of the CIA could have been involved in the assassination. He reasoned that Harvey was a very ambitious man who could use this involvement to his advantage. The memoir was not published while he was alive, and his speculations were superceded by what the dying spy told his son.
In 2007, Howard St. John Hunt told Rolling Stone that his father confessed indirect complicity in the death of John F. Kennedy. E. Howard Hunt also said Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the scheme. . However, we know that Hunt had no use for LBJ. St. John Hunt said his father wrote down that there was a French gunman on the Grassy Knoll. Most experts think this was a reference to Lucien Sarti, a famous assassin from the Corsican mafia. In 2003, the History Channel aired an interview with Christian David, a French prisoner, who named Sarti as one of three French criminals hired to kill Kennedy. However, the Frenchman was probably the late Jean Pierre Andre, who can be tied to the Miami scene. CIA records say French assassin Jean Soutre, a member of a violently anti-Kennedy organization, was in Dallas that day. Two days after the assassination, he was picked up and deported.
The senior Hunt drew a line connecting the name of Cord Meyer to LBJ. Meyer was a CIA man whose ex- wife, artist Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-1964), was mysteriously murdered on October 12, 1964. She was a early peace activist, friend of Timothy Leary ,and her father had helped fund The Masses. She had been JFK’s main mistress for two years.

A day after Kennedy’s death , Mary Meyer called a friend in New York and said JFK was killed because he was changing too fast and could no longer be controlled. By this she meant he was souring on involvement in Vietnam and becoming more distrustful of the CIA. A year later she was murdered. She cried out when shot three times by what appeared to be a disturbed young man. Had it been a professional hit, it would have been quite different . She allegedly wrote that she and JFK took LSD before having sex. After her death, James Arrington a ranking CIA official and family friend was found in her house looking for her diary. Later, Arrington purged 150 pages from the autobiography of the late Winston Scott, CIA station chief in Mexico City. Also seized were tape recordings the agency had falsely claimed were of the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald.

In 2001, Cord Meyers told interviewers that she was killed by” the same sons of bitches …that killed John F. Kennedy." Meyers was known for his leftist leanings and had been appalled when the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. He was the kind of man Hunt would love to have framed. Cord Meyer played a major role in setting up and running Operation Mockingbird, a scheme to control what the press reported. Why would the CIA be interested in Kennedy’s death? He was blamed for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and it was feared that he would splinter the agency. Yet little seemed to have happened after the Bay of Pigs other than Kennedy keeping the agency under somewhat tighter reigns. Some suggest that the CIA disagreed with Kennedy’s intention of extricating the U.S. from the civil war in Vietnam.

The elder Hunt, while talking to Howard St. John Hunt, connected Meyer’s name to Morales with a pen. It was known that Morales had bragged, “ We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” A week later E. Howard Hunt gave his son another piece of paper that said: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey [ a CIA man tied to Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancante] and Antonio Veciana.[ a member of the exile community] He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons." It went on to state that Hunt’s role was limited to attending a Miami meeting with Sturgis and Morales at which the murder of JFK was discussed. Hunt said he would not get involved in anything with Bill Harvey, “an alcoholic psycho.” Later, Hunt wrote an insulting letter to his son, and demanded a return of the JFK memo. St. John returned the original but kept a copy.. There is the possibility that Hunt could have been leading St. John on. He had long treated the club footed son with open contempt. Could it be true that even in death Hunt was covering his own tracks, shielding the people to whom he felt a lasting loyalty, and performing one last service to the CIA??

Madeleine Duncan Brown, LBJ’s mistress , told about Johnson emerging from a conference of Mafios , FBI officials, and Dallas industrialists, and saying, "those SOB's" would never embarrass him again However her comments are not inconsistent with another scenario. It has been well established that J. Edgar Hoover was close to LBJ and that the Director knew about the plot, did not warn the Secret Service, and obliquely let the mob know that Kennedy’s passing would be good for the country. It could be that LBJ just learned about the plot when he spoke to his mistress over twenty years. As for the presence of the mob at the meeting, it is now known that Hoover had many social contacts with mob people and that the CIA worked hand in glove with the mob on numerous occasions. She insisted the confab occurred on November 21, but there are evidenciary matters that suggest she had the wrong date.

In a recent book, Barr McClellan claims that LBJ, one month before his death, told his friend Don Thomas that ha instructed Edward A. Clark to arrange Kennedy’s assassination. It should be noted that Clark was an enemy of McClellan. A Clark operative recruited Lee Harvey Oswald as a shooter and patsy. Clark and Johnson were also responsible for the murder of the Department of Agriculture agent who was investigating Billy Sol Estes. Even if this scenario has value, the CIA would have had knowledge of the plot through Oswald and could have acted to make certain it was successful. The account’s only strength is that a 14 point identification of a print belonging Clark’s shooter has been found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. A letter on behalf of Billy Sol Estes by his attorney seems to confirm parts of the McClellan theory.

Gaeton Fonzi, who has written on the subject and once did investigative work for Senator Richard Schweiker, when the Pennsylvanian was part of a two person subcommittee of the Church Committee, entrusted with looking into the murder of JFK. Richard Schweiker, was sure that David Atlee Phillips, the Miami Station chief, and David Morales were deeply involved. Shawn Phillips said his father David Atlee Philllips was in Dallas that day. . Morales was head of operations at the Miami station, which was also the headquarters for The Forty, an assassins squad formed in 1959. Edwin Wilson, Barry Seal, William Seymour, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming were early members. It was later expanded to 70 agents. Morales allegedly confessed to a friend in 1973, ““Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” He died before he could testify. Had he lived he would have said nothing as he feared being killed by the agency.

Fonzi went on to be an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1976-1978. In fact he was one of only two investigators who regularly in the field. The Committee was poorly funded and its very existence was precarious because few in Washington really wanted to look carefully into the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It went through three chief counsels, the last of whom told the press that the report established that the mob was behind the death of Kennedy. In fact the report did not establish this; although, mobster Jack Ruby did enter the story, probably as a hired CIA cut out, by eliminating Lee Harvey Oswald. If the mob played a larger role, it was probably because it had a long established relationship with the CIA.

Ruby’s testimony to Earl Warren leaves other matters unanswered. He seemed to realize that the death of Kennedy and his action would bring rightists to power, and that would hurt a lot of people. He begged be moved to Washingtron, where he could tell his whole story. Of course, what he said is not inconsistent with the postulate that conservatives within the agency did in Kennedy.