Chapter 4

Hersh Cranks Up His Imagined Model T Ford

Before resuming with the history according to Hersh, a little on the CIA's efforts to get Castro killed and how far back that went. It did not begin when the Eisenhower administration asked it to as the Edwards memo says, in August of 1960. The CIA was in that Castro assassination business before it was asked to do it by the administration. This is also to say that despite its pretenses the CIA was up to assassinations, particularly that of Castro, without official authorization for it. More of that mind reading we saw with Helms was the only authorization it had or needed.

We referred earlier to the testimony of William Attwood, the journalist and diplomat. It was Top Secret testimony until it was disclosed under the 1992 Act that required disclosure of all possible records in any way relating to the assassination of the President. His testimony was not printed by the Senate intelligence committee, to which he testified on July 10, 1975, so it exists in typescript only. (I include it in full in the Afterword I wrote for the manuscript Waketh the Watchman.)

At the time of interest to the Senate intelligence committee Attwood was one of our ambassadors to the United Nations, under Adlai Stevenson. He had been a country ambassador and he was about to be again when he represented our government, specifically, as he testified, President Kennedy, in the beginning of a joint effort with Cuba — with Castro — to try to get relations back closer to normal. In an unusual move, Eisenhower had broken relations with Cuba after the election and just before Kennedy was sworn in. Administrations are not supposed to set policy after they lose elections but before the new administration takes over but the Eisenhower administration did that, fixing on Kennedy a policy that he could do nothing about, at least to begin with. Then, according to Attwood, Castro, personally, got the effort started by getting Lisa Howard, and ABC-TV News correspondent who had interviewed him, to make his approach informally, through Attwood, who was known and respected in Cuba (transcript, page 4). In his testimony Attwood made the record that he got word from President Kennedy on November 19 that on his return from his trip to Texas the President wanted to go over this with him in the White House and consider what the possibilities might be (transcript, page 9). But the next time the President was in the White House he was a corpse. He was assassinated three days after the message from him reached Attwood.

Robert Kennedy was in on this (transcript, page 5). Both Kennedys were in favor of the effort but Robert was more concerned about domestic reaction against it if there were leaks.

Johnson did not want to pursue this possibility of improving relations with Cuba so, it was not pursued once Kennedy was dead.

Killed, by coincidence, after he let it be known that he was interested in exploring this overture from Castro, which Castro had made in several ways, not only through Lisa Howard. Attwood, whose name is misspelled by the court reporter, was in Cuba in 1959 when he was the foreign editor of Look magazine. The planned assassination of Castro a year before the one that the CIA tried to arrange with the Mafia was talked about so openly that as foreign editor of Look Attwood was actually introduced to a man who was to have been one of the assassins and those who were behind that attempt, included a man Attwood was told was CIA:

Mr Atwood. The only part, I might add one thing. I was there in '59. I did know at that time that certainly assassination was very much in the air. I had gone down — I was then Foreign Editor of Look Magazine — and I spent quite a lot of time with Castro and at that time — when I returned I was told quite flatly by Julio Lobo who was the man in sugar that Castro that Castro would not live out the year, there was a contract out on him.

Senator Baker. Did he say by whom?

Mr. Atwood. He didn't say.

The Chairman. Can you fix the date again?

Mr. Atwood. This was 1959. While I was down there, I actually went to a party. I was told that there were some CIA men. I had no reason to believe they were or they weren't. There were discussions seriously, they were talking quite openly about assassinating Castro. This was in July of 1959 and plans were being made.

As a matter of fact, I was introduced to two alleged assassins, people who had been selected to do the job, which actually dumfounded me. But I think, seeing the security, the sloppy security that surrounded this man, the determination of these people to do away with him, it occurred to me that he probably wouldn't live out the year. I'm surprised, frankly, that he did.

The Chairman. Where was this party?

Mr. Atwood. Just outside of Havanna near the Havanna Country Club.

The Chairman. At whose house?

Mr. Atwood. I don't recall whose house it was. It was some wealthy Cubans or Americans, I don't recall the name.

Senator Tower. You said they actually were identified CIA people?

Mr. Atwood. I was told later that one of them was a CIA person.

Senator Tower. But you had no confirmation?

Mr. Atwood. I had no way of knowing. I wouldn't testify.

The Chairman. This was the discussion among certain rich Cubans and Americans?

Mr. Atwood. And Americans. They were saying we are going to do away with this man, he's a maniac and . . . (Transcript pages 11-2).

I knew a man who was in a motorcade with Castro when an attempt to kill him was made before the Bay of Pigs, when Eisenhower was President.

Douglas Lethbridge was a Canadian, he told me, raised on a farm next to the one on which Castro was raised. He said they were friends and that he joined Castro's revolution but later grew disenchanted, fled Cuba, was trained for the Bay of Pigs invasion and was taken prisoner there. He told me that the motorcade in which he was with Castro in it, out in the countryside, had stopped for a break. When they started up, Castro changed from the jeep in which he was to one in which he had not been. Before long there was an attack on the motorcade and an explosive, if after thirty years I remember correctly, a hand-held rocket, hit the jeep Castro had left, killing those in it.

When the Cuban government disclosed those attempts to assassinate Castro of which it knew to members of our Congress, this was included.

This was long enough before the Bay of Pigs, which was in mid-April, 1961, for Lethbridge to have become disenchanted, then to escape, then to join those training for the Bay of Pigs down in Guatemala, and to take that training and be captured in that invasion,

In trying to fabricate the non-existing case of the Kennedys using the Mafia in further efforts to kill Castro, the only real sources Hersh can claim are those who have their own records to hide and to lie about when they were in the CIA. Of them he uses extensively one former CIA man who was involved in its anti-Castro operations, Samuel Halpern (correct), on twenty-one pages.

Referring to interviews of others who had been in the CIA, Hersh quotes Halpern as saying that "none of us that I know of" knew of any "national security" basis for Operation Mongoose (page 284). To quote Halpern on this is as though Hersh asked if he would rather go to Atlantic City or by bus. There was no point in it other than a baseless argument raised out of nothing more than his need by Hersh. Operation Mongoose was an operation that was for an invasion of Cuba, but only if and when the internal disturbances the CIA was always expecting turned into the revolt it wanted but of which there was no rational expectation. It had nothing to do with assassinating Castro, despite Hersh's false pretenses and those formerly of the CIA with their own pasts and their own involvement to gild. Understanding of this will help understand Hersh and those he uses in his fiction, like Halpern.

Marty Callighan, of the WPA Film Library, who was researching a TV documentary, sent me a few of the records he obtained. One is pages from the official State Department book, Foreign Relations, 1961-3, Volume X. There are in it two memos by the man who from the titles on these memos was "Chief of Operations, Operation Mongoose (Lansdale)" (page 830) and "Memoranda, from the Chief of Operations, Operation Mongoose (Lansdale) to Special group (Augmented)" pages 831ff. Both memos are dated June 14, 1962.

Brigadier Edward G. Lansdale was, surprise of surprise, a CIA star, a real CIA eminence. And he was in charge of Operation Mongoose ! (I include the full texts verbatim in the previously mentioned Afterword of Waketh the Watchman.)

The title this CIA eminence, who was an army general, put on the first of these memos is "Spontaneous Revolts in Cuba, Contingency Planning."

The first sentence in the first of these memos says the planning is for what to do "in a situation of open, widespread revolt in Cuba." The planning is for that development.

The first page of the memo goes into, italics in original, Possible Contingency. The rumored uprising of the Cuban people in mid-June," which did not happen. The "Coordinating Instructions" on the second page makes no reference to and does not even hint at assassinating Castro.

The "special Group Augmented" in the title of the second memo, was Halpern's CIA home.

That State Department volume also includes the National Intelligence Estimate, NIE 85-
2-62. The third of the conclusions in it begins, "The Cuban armed forces are loyal to the personal leadership of the Castro bothers." Not much chance of that revolt the CIA was always looking for.

On the second page under the "Central Intelligence Agency Operations," the first paragraph states that "CIA operations against Cuba are controlled by a component of CIA Headquarters, Washington," which is where Halpern was in it, but "Operations elements are located in the vicinity of Miami, Florida . . ."

The second CIA paragraph begins, "In the event of localized revolt," and it says the CIA will give "covert support."

The third paragraph states what was not previously reported, that arrangements have already been made for the CIA to bypass the President's control over it:

"When U.S. military intervention is directed and contingency plans are implemented, the CIA will fully support the military actions in accordance with the JCS/CIA Command Relationship Agreement whether it is implemented or not." State has a footnote on this. It reads, "Not found," It could not find a copy of that agreement anywhere! This appears to mean that it could not get a copy from the Joint Chiefs or from the CIA. In short, it was close to Secret, and on the record it was kept that way.

I do not recall ever reading of this or hearing of it, not in any newspaper or magazine or book or on radio or TV.

Now returning to those memos on the Operation Mongoose that without doubt was of considerable interest to both Kennedys, no copy of any of this is directed to either one of them. The second appears to be an internal Mongoose memo with no distribution indicated. The first one went to four people only, none in the White House. One went to the Chief of the Joint Chiefs and another to "William Harvey, CIA."

What is clear is that Mongoose did not include and did not even visualize the assassination of Castro, regardless of what Hersh and his CIA sources say or imply. What is also clear is that Halpern had involvements and knowledge not reflected in what Hersh attributes to him and writes about him.

There is some tricky writing at the beginning of the passage:

After his meeting with Bissell in early January 1961, Bill Harvey had no illusions about what ZR/RIFLE and executive action were supposed to accomplish. He immediately scheduled a meeting with Bissell's scientific adviser, Sidney Gottlieb, who could produce a lethal virus or poison on demand. In an interview for this book in 1994, Gottlieb told me that Harvey said, "I've been asked to form this group to assassinate people and I need to know what you can do for me." Harvey kept notes of that meeting, too — notes he did not turn over to the CIA's inspector general in 1967 — and they indicate that the meeting with Gottlieb took place five days after Kennedy's inauguration. The two men specifically discussed Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo as potential targets (page 191).

Assuming this to be true about ZR/RIFLE, when in January was Harvey told to organize it? "Early" is before the Kennedy administration was in office. But to give the opposite impression to lead the trusting reader to believe that ZR/RIFLE was a Kennedy project rather than of the last Eisenhower administration days, Hersh says that Harvey's meeting with Gottlieb was "five days after Kennedy's inauguration."

The whole thing is ridiculous on the face of it, other than giving the ongoing CIA assassination gang a name. We saw that they were involved in attempts against Castro beginning no later than the middle of 1959, which was a year and a half before Kennedy took office. We saw that the Mafia plot that Hersh and his CIA self-seekers would like to pin on Kennedy dates to before the election, to August of 1960. Lumumba was done in just before Kennedy was inaugurated, and when he was no longer premier of The Congo.

In short, without the ZR/RIFLE name, the CIA was deep into the assassination business before Kennedy was President!

As Hersh knows very well and does not say here, to give his anti-Kennedy fabrication more credibility. Harvey was a wild man that even inside the CIA was not taken at his wild, wild word, two-pistoled wild word. And the Bissell who allegedly told Harvey to get into assassinations with ZR/RIFLE "in early January 1961," he is the one who, according to the Sheffield Edwards memo for the Attorney General, got that Eisenhower/Mafia/CIA plot Hersh would pin on Kennedy started five months before January 1961. Besides which there are those many authenticated attempts to assassinate Castro before ZR/RIFLE.

After reporting that security was so lax mafioso Joe Bonanno knew about it and kept pestering the Bissell office with his offers to kill Castro, Hersh writes

In the fall of 1961, Harvey was assigned to what became known as Task Force W, the CIA component in a get-Castro squad that was assembled by the White House. He spent much of the next year and a half plotting to overthrow and kill the Cuban leader — and growing increasingly frustrated about the constant pressure to do so from Robert Kennedy. Harvey's animosity toward the attorney general grew with each failed assassination attempt. It was Harvey's frustration, apparently, that led to a breach of his rules about never talking out of turn. At some point he told a valued colleague, Samuel Halpern, the executive officer of Task Force W, what no one in the CIA would ever tell Congress: that Jack Kennedy had personally authorized Richard Bissell to set up ZR/RIFLE before his inauguration. "After the election," Halpern recalled in one of his many interviews for this book, "Kennedy asked Bissell to create a capacity for political assassination. That's why Harvey set up ZR/RIFLE" (page 192).

The efforts to assassinate Castro continued. That Kennedy, either Kennedy, authorized them is without proof and without credibility.

Again, no source when sourcing is so needed to give some semblance of substance to what Hersh writes. In this Hersh formulation Halpern was actually part of a CIA component that was to "get" or assassinate Castro. Hersh himself says "kill." That being the case, any blame for what he puts on anyone else is on this basis alone at least suspect.

For Harvey to be the authority, the sole authority, for the canard that "President Kennedy personally authorized Richard Bissell to set up ZR/RIFLE" and for that to be third hand when it got to Hersh means it has no credibility, especially given Harvey's reputation and what Halpern wanted to gloss over, his own involvement in "plotting to overthrow and kill the Cuban Leader."

Halpern and all the others formerly in the CIA have every motive for trying to cover for themselves and the CIA. Because they were all involved in the efforts to kill Castro that they seek, with Hersh's money-inspired help, to pin on the Kennedys and in that to reduce or eliminate their own responsibilities, if not under the law for the most serious of major crimes.

Hersh seeks to cover for the CIA at every point. Where he quoted Halpern as stating none of them saw any saw any national security in Mongoose, it was not any national security matter to begin with. He also quotes Halpern as saying that "None of us that I know of 'thought' that Cuba was all that important in," that same irrelevancy, "terms of national security." He attributes all sort of other silliness to Halpern as long as it can be given an anti-Kennedy cast, even in terms of his concept of their concept of their manhood. But they do pretend that none of it was the fault of or the failing of the CIA, only of the Kennedys (page 284). It all is written to cover up for those of the CIA whose operations against Cuba, not limited to the Mongoose plan, failed other than as minor pinpricks as various enterprises were attacked and damaged or destroyed.

This also serves as buildup for what follows which is, typically, sourceless and without any confirmation at all, false and impossible, that Robert Kennedy has his own operation going:

There was further humiliation for the men of Task Force W. Bobby Kennedy, increasingly impatient with the lack of progress in Cuba, decided in the early spring of 1962 to run his own operation. He once again moved into the back channel, as he had done with the Soviets, this time working with the Mafia. On his orders an experienced clandestine CIA operative named Charles Ford was assigned as the attorney general's personal agent. Kennedy's unprecedented request went up the chain of command to General Marshall Carter, the new deputy CIA director, for approval. Ford spent the next eighteen months, until the assassination of President Kennedy, making secret trips, at Bobby Kennedy's direction, to Mafia chieftains in the United States and Canada, while continuing to serve with Harvey and Halpern on Task Force W. "Bobby was absolutely convinced," Halpern told me, "that the mob had a stay-behind system in Cuba since they had so many assets left there. There were the casinos and gambling dens and prostitution rings and God knows what else. Kennedy thought that by tapping into those stay-behind units we could get some decent intelligence on what's going on in Cuba. The concept was crazy. The Mafia couldn't have set up a stay-behind system; it's too hard. Also, Castro had a great internal security system and you couldn't work contacts in the cities. That's why we" — in 'Task Force W — "operated in the countryside" (page 288).

The "concept was crazy," was it?

As we see, this is, in itself, ample reason for Hersh to have "repressed" that Edwards memo and the related Hoover memo to Robert Kennedy, for all that Halpern describes as silly and attributes too the Kennedys was in fact the position, the expressed belief, the hope and expectation of the CIA itself! The CIA whose bare ass Halpern seeks to cover, his own also being bare.

When he has this from the most dubious source, Halpern, and plans to use it, and when he knows that the line Halpern feeds him as that of the Kennedys was in fact the CIA's, can it be believed that it was by accident or for reasons of style or any other writing consideration that Hersh "repressed" the CIA memo by its chief of security and the related Hoover memo? Which have those ideas pretty much in those words and in the heads of Bissell and five others at the top of the CIA?

With what we quote next, nothing omitted from quotation, we see the new standard of the new journalism of that "#1 investigative journalist," Hersh:

It was possible, Halpern said, Bobby Kennedy's primary purpose in dealing with Charles Ford was to do what Bill Harvey was not doing — find someone to assassinate Fidel Castro. "Charlie saw Kennedy in his office and of course talked to him on the phone quite regularly." Halpern told me. "Charlie was a good officer, and Bobby was his case officer. Charlie never reported that kind of information to me. He may never have reported it to anybody. He was Bobby's man. Nobody's going to touch him" (page 288).

"It is possible" as proof of what could not have been possible and of which there is no proof, including from the Halpern/Hersh combination. There likewise is not only no proof, there is no reason to believe that the dead Ford, who can't deny it, was working on anything like assassination for the dead Kennedy, who also, dead, can't deny it.

There are some things that are so basic in intelligence they do not change. One is need-to-
know, which also means no loose talk. I sat next to men and had no idea what they were working on when I was first detailed to the OSS by the Army. We were four in that office and there was no small talk about what we were doing. If we needed help we asked for it, as did others. I did several jobs for other intelligence components as a trouble-shooter and did not know for whom I was asked to do those jobs or how others had failed when they tried.

That was the norm and it remains the norm. Need-to-know is basic in all legitimate intelligence work. Ford should have said nothing.

Having said that, it is also necessary to point out that in addition to there being no proof that Ford was in any assassination role for Robert Kennedy or anyone else or any reason to believe that Robert Kennedy had anyone at all in that role, there was an obvious role for Ford that had to have been obvious to Halpern and should have been to Hersh.

Robert Kennedy was very interested in Mongoose. He needed a contact with the CIA for that. No other contact is mentioned anywhere, none by Hersh, certainly. So, as those supposed experts should have known, the most likely role for Ford was contact and liaison with the CIA itself.

Next Hersh contradicts Halpern and himself on Ford being with Robert Kennedy and talking to him on the phone "quite regularly."

Kennedy initiated some of the telephone calls to Ford, Halpern said, but they were made on his behalf by Angie Novello, his longtime personal secretary. Novello, interviewed for this book briefly by telephone in 1994, said she remembered Halpern but had 'no memory' of ever calling CIA operatives, including Ford.*

That * reads:

Halpern's recollection of conversations between Kennedy and Ford is supported in part by Robert Kennedy's telephone logs and appointment book for 1962, as made public by the Kennedy Library in 1994. They show that Kennedy met twice with Ford in September and also received a telephone call that month from Ford . . . (pages 286-7).

Hersh knew, as his editors also should have known, that when the official records show that Ford met with Robert Kennedy only twice and was phoned only once for the entire year 1962 that not only does not confirm Halpern. It disproves what he and Hersh just said, that Ford "saw Kennedy in his office and of course talked to him on the phone quite regularly." Three contacts for the entire year is hardly "regular" contact.

Hersh's note also confirms Kennedy's secretary who Hersh sought to pull down in the way he phrased what he says she said.

For Hersh in this book, whatever Halpern says or asks or wonders or conjectures is the given word, instant fact, and is presented as beyond questioning. Halpern next seeks to attribute to Robert what his own component was doing and he makes out that Robert was cozy with the Mafia. Of that there is no proof at all and there is ample reason not to believe it:

"I don't know how Bobby Kennedy squared that in his own mind," Halpern said, "On the one hand, he allegedly was going after the Mafia to destroy them; on the other hand, he was using them for information about Cuba. Maybe it was a deal he made with them. Who knows?" Ford, who died in the late 1980s, never discussed — even years later — his missions for Kennedy, Halpern said.

Bobby Kennedy was doing more than "allegedly" going after the Mafia. Within days of taking office in January 1961, the attorney general had announced what the Wall Street Journal approvingly depicted as the "most sweeping campaign against gangsters, labor racketeers and vice overlords that the country has ever seen." His goal, Kennedy said, was to jail top criminals by bringing them up on whatever charges could be proven in a court of law. Kennedy backed up his words by invigorating the Justice Department's organized crime division and decreeing that he would make war on crime his priority as attorney general (pages 297-8).

There is no doubt about the vigor of Robert Kennedy's prosecutions of the Mafia and all connected with it who he could get before a judge. His was the most vigorous prosecution ever of them. He could not possibly be prosecuting those who could defend themselves by telling the court, "I was working for him," and point to Kennedy. Nor could he expect any help from those he prosecuted or if he were to get help from those he might be prosecuting, he could not trust it.

In plain English, what Hersh has here, with his source of just about anything and everything, Halpern, makes no sense at all no matter how Hersh makes it appear to be reasonable with how he writes it.

The question is not, as Halpern put it, with all the duplicity so useful in intelligence, that he didn't know "how Bobby Kennedy squared in his own mind" what there was no proof he was doing. The question is how can Hersh and Halpern square what they are up to with anything decent, honest or honorable.

The beginning of what follows, Hersh's account that CIA/Mafia plot, begins with an illustration of one aspect of this Hersh-it method of writing and rewriting, make on something is proven, repeat it over and over again and before long treat it as proven beyond question, here that Ford business:

Robert Kennedy's previously unrevealed involvement with Charles Ford provides new insight into a May 1962 meeting in the Justice Department. Arthur Schlesinger and other Kennedy admirers have repeatedly cited the meeting as evidence of both the attorney general's innocence of the CIA's assassination plotting and his adamant disapproval of any collaboration with organized crime.

At issue was a year-old dispute between the CIA and the FBI over the FBI's insistence on prosecuting Sam Giancana on wiretap charges that stemmed from Giancana's jealousy. The incident took place in October 1960, when Giancana and Robert Maheu, the private investigator who was then serving as a CIA cutout, were sharing a hotel suite in Miami while trying to find a way to assassinate Castro. Giancana became convinced that his girlfriend, the singer Phyllis McGuire, was having an affair in Las Vegas with Dan Rowan, of the comedy team of Rowan and Martin. Maheu, eager to keep Giancana in Miami — and perhaps seeking to ingratiate himself with his Mafia collaborator — got approval from his CIA handlers, along with some necessary cash, and arranged to have Rowan's hotel room bugged . . . (pages 289-90).

As we saw with the official records suppressed by Hersh, who had them, there was no Ford connection with that mess. Nor was Robert Kennedy connected with it in any way until after it was exposed. But it did give Kennedy a real problem: how could he take the case he had against Giancana to court when the CIA had Giancana working for it in its, not Kennedy's, effort to get Castro assassinated?

What an unprecedented international scandal there would have been, what a clamor from the Congress, what expressions of outrage ranging from the clergy to the media, there would have been if, in federal court, either Giancana or his lawyer had told this story!

So, of course, Kennedy did not dare take the federal case against the top Mafia don to court!

Thanks to those who Hersh defends, the CIA and its many Halperns.

Earlier Hersh quoted a record he does not use, does not present to the reader, as saying that Robert Kennedy was "angry" and that a memo gave him cause for that anger.

He did not have cause when he could not prosecute one of the top mad mafia don when he did have a case on which he could get a conviction? And when the CIA had contrived that incredible situation without his knowledge?

When without stating that it is the reason for that anger Hersh gets around to his left- handed admission of it, he immediately seeks to put it all back on Robert though his imaginary Ford operation that, as we saw, has no basis other than the desperate needs of Hersh and his oracle Halpern.

In plain English, Hersh lied here and in what follows. Although Exner did say she carried messages, that has to be a lie because no Kennedy knew a thing about that CIA/Mafia fiasco until it blew up on the CIA, as we have seen in the official CIA records:

Houston, who was also questioned for the IG Report, described Bobby Kennedy as saying that "he could see the problem and that he would not proceed against those [Giancana et al.] involved in the wiretapping case." Kennedy added, speaking "quite firmly, 'I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again with gangsters - you will let the Attorney General know before you do it.'" At the time, of course, as Houston and Edwards apparently did not know, Kennedy — aided by Charles Ford — was himself trying to do business in Cuba with organized crime. Kennedy also was goading the agency to get on with getting rid of Castro and knew, as did his brother, that a pretty California woman named Judith Campbell was carrying messages to that effect between the president, Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli (page 290).

(Here Hersh slips up a bit. He has already quoted his oracle Halpern as the authority for saying there was no organized crime left in Cuba, so how could Robert Kennedy "do business in Cuba with organized crime"? The wonder is, with all of this just made up, that Hersh did not slip up more often with self-disclosures like this.)

This is not only the Hersh-it technique. It is that of Goebbels.

Of similar quality is what Hersh misuses of his selection from the CIA inspector general's report for. Hersh has made little of, tried to deprecate, what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said. Now Hersh has on pages 291-2,

The gist of the IG Report and Church Committee testimony is this: On May 7, 1962, the attorney general, having learned for the first time that the CIA had retained Giancana and Rosselli to murder Castro before the Bay of Pigs, did nothing more than tell the agency not to use the Mafia without clearing it with him first. He took no names, began no inquiry, and did nothing to make sure that such efforts never took place again. The incomplete and possibly false Edwards- Houston account of their meeting with Kennedy became the basis for Schlesinger's conclusion, in Robert Kennedy and his Times, that "the Kennedys did not know about the Castro assassination plots before the Bay of Pigs or about the pursuit of those plots by the CIA after the Bay of Pigs." (Page ?)

If there is anything "incomplete and possibly [sic] false" in the Edwards report, Hersh has no proof of it and not even a reason to suspect it in his book. It is by now his standby technique, Hersh-it with what is made up or conjectured and then repeated for all the world as though it is fact when it is not.

What kind of falsity is "possibly false?" It is false or it is not, and if a writer alleges either he has the responsibility for presenting proof along with what he says.

Unless he is a Hersh who has a publisher willing to depart from traditional standards.

Robert Kennedy had the assurance, not only verbally but as we have seen, in writing, that the CIA was finished with that Mafia plot. What else was he to tell those people other than what he did, not to do what prevented prosecution and not to think of anything like that without talking to him? What is wrong with this, as Hersh tried to make it appear to be wrong?

Not a thing!

If Hersh has any proof that the Edwards report was either incomplete or false he has not presented it. But with this Hersh-it method that were so acceptable to Little, Brown he had no need to. All he had to do was say it, regardless of whether it was true or not or even reasonable.

His apparent source for trying to cast doubt on that report was William Harvey, who had his own motives for giving that impression.

And, of course, there is always Halpern, to whom fact is immaterial. That his CIA had prevented a Mafia prosecution is not worth Halpern's consideration, or Hersh's, so Hersh quotes him:

Sam Halpern believes that he understands the import of the May 7 meeting: "Bobby was not telling us to stop, but [was telling us] not to do it again without checking with him." If that interpretation is correct, Kennedy's goal in the meeting with Houston and Edwards was twofold: to get on the record a statement that the CIA had ended its assassination plotting and, much more important, to ensure that the agency did not authorize a future clandestine operation that could compromise or endanger Charles Ford's continued meetings with the Mafia (page 292).

Here we have new forms of journalistic fact, of proof, what someone who is very much parti pris "believes." Or say he does, no matter how obviously unreasonable it is. There was no need for Robert Kennedy to tell the CIA to stop doing what it had told him it had stopped doing more than a year earlier.

This is followed by still another form of "#1 investigative journalism," proof, establishing fact by "if-ing" it, as in "If this is true," as it obviously is not.

However, there is the admission that Kennedy got the assurance "that the CIA had ended its assassination plotting." With this assurance, what need was there for him to say any about that to it?

That Ford fiction is no longer worth any mention or time. It is baseless, as Hersh's own reporting of the Kennedy appointments and phone calls for the year establish, and all else is baseless conjecture by Hersh, who needs it to have his book, and Halpern, who needs it to cover himself, his associates and their pasts.

What was continued, as Hersh himself reports from the Church Committee testimony, was done by Harvey. Of that Edwards testified, "I thought Mr. Harvey was pretty foolish to continue this thing" after it was supposed to have ended (page 291).

That a Pulitzer winner could go for so much junk is hard to believe even when we see it. But he is unrepentant about it.

In the Columbia University history professor's opinion, expressed at the end of his commentary for Time magazine, he says that this Hersh book and its contents depressed him but that what was most "depressing is to see such shoddy and careless arguments and such self- serving credulity coming from a celebrated investigative reporter."

Hersh was interviewed by Fred Kaplan of the Boston Globe. Kaplan's lengthy article appeared November 12, two days after the book was out. Kaplan showed Hersh the Time article by Brinkley. Kaplan the wrote, "He leafs through the attack in Time by Alan Brinkley, at Columbia University, and says 'Who's this guy'" and not a thing more according to Kaplan.

Hersh had learned that he does not have to be responsive. So, he wasn't.

And he did not have to respond to the criticism in Time or by Brinkley.

Besides what could he say? The criticism was accurate and justified and so was Brinkley's opinion.

And with an advance of a million dollars and more coming in from TV, by which he was paid for more than a year, and with that first print of more than a third of a million copies in hardback, and with the Book-of-the-Month taking it before he wrote a word, and with all the controversy bound to sell books, he knew he had his "score," the money he set out to make and from the record was without any concern at all for how he made it.