Final_Judgment

176 A Little Unpleasantness [115]
THE CIA AND THE JFK ASSASSINATION
It was not until the release of Plausible Denial that the extent of the
CIA's involvement in the JFK assassination was fully outlined. Suspicion
of the CIA's complicity was commonplace over the years, but Lane's book
proved the matter once and for all. And, significantly, his book was a
written summation of a libel trial in Miami some years previously in which
the jury had concluded that the CIA had indeed been involved in the JFK
assassination conspiracy and cover-up.
The circumstances of how the trial came about are interesting. It was in
1978, that a Washington-based weekly newspaper, The Spotlight, published
an article by former high-ranking CIA official Victor Marchetti which
alleged the CIA intended to frame longtime CIA operative E. Howard Hunt
for involvement in the Kennedy assassination.
Hunt, of course, was the CIA's chief political liaison with the anti-
Castro Cuban community during the period leading up to the JFK
assassination and who had, subsequently, over the years, been mentioned as
a suspect in the assassination conspiracy.
(Hunt had organized, on the CIA's behalf, several anti-Castro Cuban
groups, including the Revolutionary Democratic Front. Hunt's Cuban point
man in the RDF, Antonio de Varona, in fact, personally received funding for
the RDF from Meyer Lansky himself.) 313
Marchetti's article suggested that there was then so much growing
suspicion that the CIA had been involved in the JFK assassination that the
CIA had decided that it would sacrifice Hunt and say that Hunt was a
"renegade" operative involved in the president's assassination.
HUNT A FREE-LANCE OPERATIVE?
However, according to Marchetti, the CIA intended to say that Hunt and
his co-conspirators had been operating independently—that the CIA as an
institution had not been part of the conspiracy.
Although the editors of The Spotlight felt Marchetti's article served, if
anything, as an advance warning to Hunt about what his former employers
had in mind, the ex-CIA man decided to sue, even though he ultimately
admitted under oath that he believed The Spotlight's story seemed plausible.
When the case finally went to trial in federal court in Miami, the newspaper
suffered a devastating loss. The jury found in favor of Hunt and ordered The
Spotlight to pay $650,000 in damages.
Fortunately—for The Spotlight—an error in the trial judge's
instructions to the jury gave the populist weekly grounds for an appeal.
When the case was successfully appealed and ordered for retrial, Mark
Lane—an attorney—stepped in for the defense.
Among the big names deposed during the Hunt case were: former CIA
Director Richard Helms; former CIA Director Stansfield Turner; former
CIA chief for the Western Hemisphere David Phillips; and former CIA and
FBI man (and Watergate celebrity) G. Gordon Liddy. The most damning