Reclaiming History (288 page)

As it turns out, though Clark’s story was a fabrication in that he had never spoken to Castro, an earlier source told the FBI essentially the same story. In a June 17, 1964, letter to Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin, J. Edgar Hoover said a “confidential source” who had “furnished reliable information in the past” reported that Castro had “recently said” that “our people in Mexico gave us the details” of Oswald’s visit to the Mexican consulate, and when his request for a visa “was refused him, he headed out saying ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy for this.’”
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The story doesn’t make sense.
Why would Oswald threaten to kill Kennedy because the Cuban consulate turned down his request for a visa
? What’s the connection? Silvia Duran, the secretary at the consulate who dealt with Oswald and was present at the time of Oswald’s outburst when his request for a visa was denied, said she heard no such threat by Oswald against Kennedy.
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And the Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue, who was also present, also said no such threat by Oswald was made, adding that if it had, he would “have passed this information on to Fidel.”
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It should be noted that the Warren Commission should have included in its report Oswald’s alleged threat to kill Kennedy at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, but it did not, and I have not been able to find Hoover’s letter to Rankin in any of the Commission’s volumes of exhibits.

The story was given a fillip by a secretary at the Cuban consulate whose office was on the second floor, Luisa Calderon Carralero. In a CIA-intercepted telephone call several hours after the assassination, when a male called Calderon at the consulate and asked her if she had heard the news of the president’s death, she replied, in a joking manner, “Yes, of course, I knew it almost before Kennedy…Imagine, one, two, three and now, that makes three [she laughs], what barbarians!”
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The HSCA construed Calderon’s remark, if true, as indicating either “foreknowledge or mere braggadocio. The preponderance of the evidence led the committee to find that it was braggadocio.” When the committee sought to interview Calderon in Cuba, she declined based on illness. However, she did respond to the HSCA’s written interrogatories, denying any foreknowledge of the assassination. Because the HSCA sensed from the demeanor of many other employees at the Cuban consulate that they were telling the truth when they denied having any foreknowledge of the assassination, the committee concluded that Oswald had not “voiced a threat [to kill Kennedy] to Cuban officials.” With respect to the “confidential, reliable source” who said he did, the HSCA said, “However reliable the confidential source may be, the committee found it to be in error in this instance.”
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How did this story, which arguably connected Castro with Kennedy’s assassination, get started? A few days after the assassination (November 26), Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte, a twenty-three-year-old Nicaraguan secret agent purporting to be working against the Cuban Communists for his country’s security service, went to the American embassy in Mexico City and claimed that on September 18, 1963, he was at the Cuban consulate seeking to get to Cuba with the intent to infiltrate Castro’s forces. While standing by the bathroom door, he said he saw three men conversing on an adjacent patio. One was a black man, tall and thin, with reddish hair. The second was a Canadian with blonde hair, and the third man was Lee Harvey Oswald. A tall Cuban joined the group only long enough to pass some currency to the black man. Alvarado said he then overheard the black man say to Oswald, “I want to kill the man,” whereupon Oswald replied, “You’re not man enough, I can do it.” The black man then said, “I can’t go with you, I have a lot to do.” He then gave Oswald $6,500 in large-denomination American bills (he doesn’t say how he knew it was $6,500—did he see and bother to count the denominations adding up to $6,500?), $5,000 as compensation to kill Kennedy and $1,500 as expense money, saying, “This isn’t much.”
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Could anyone with an IQ above 50 possibly believe that this was Oswald’s recruitment into the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and his payment for being the triggerman? Well, Thomas Mann, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico at the time, did believe it. He cabled his superiors at the State Department in Washington that “Castro is the kind of person who would avenge himself in this way. He is the Latin type of extremist who reacts viscerally rather than intellectually.” Mann added that “the unprofessional, almost lackadaisical way in which the money is alleged by Alvarado to have been passed to Oswald fits the way Cubans would be expected to act if the Russians were not guiding them.” Mann requested, in his cable, that the aforementioned Luisa Calderon be arrested because she may have been present when Oswald was given the money.
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Mann didn’t have his fill. Though only the ambassador to Mexico, not a member of U.S. intelligence, he requested through the State Department that the FBI send a knowledgeable agent from Washington down to Mexico City to investigate Alvarado’s claim,
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and he himself wanted to get actively involved in investigating whether Oswald killed Kennedy for Castro. Hoover, who referred to Mann as “one of the pseudo-investigators, a Sherlock Holmes,” was opposed to sending anyone to Mexico City, feeling the FBI agent assigned to the American embassy in Mexico City, Clark Anderson, could do whatever was necessary, and besides, this was a matter for the CIA in Mexico City to handle. Mann was so persistent, however, that Hoover, mostly to pacify Mann, ultimately did send an agent to Mexico City for a few days, but the agent didn’t even get to interrogate Alvarado and was sent home.
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Apart from the fact that Oswald was in New Orleans, not Mexico City, on September 18, 1963 (the day Alvarado said the incident took place), when Mexico police interrogated Alvarado, he admitted, in writing, that he had made up the whole matter. His motive, he said, was that he hated Castro and hoped his story would cause the United States to “take action” against him. When reinterrogated by the CIA, he first claimed the Mexico police had pressured him into retracting his story, and that his retraction, not his first statement, was false. He was then given a polygraph test by a CIA polygraph expert assisted by an FBI agent. The test indicated he was probably lying, prompting Alvarado to say, “I know such machines are accurate, and therefore, I suppose I must be mistaken.”
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On December 1, 1963, less than a week after Alvarado’s claim, another Mexican, Pedro Gutierrez Valencia, a credit investigator for a large Mexico City department store, wrote a letter to President Johnson, making a claim analogous to but not corroborative of Alvarado’s: The date (September 30 or October 1, 1963) was different from Alvarado’s; there were two men, not three; and the location was in front of the Cuban embassy, not on a patio to the rear of the consulate. Gutierrez, leaving the embassy after conducting a credit investigation of one of its employees, claims he heard a heated discussion, in English, between a Cuban and an American in which he could understand only the words “Castro,” “Cuba,” and “Kennedy.” The Cuban counted out American dollars and gave them to the American, at which time they got into the Cuban’s car and drove off. Gutierrez said the American was Oswald.
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Again, the extreme improbability that any agreement and payment for Kennedy’s murder would take place not in private, but literally out in the open in view of others, and under the other circumstances Gutierrez described, is alone enough to discount the story. But other facts that undermine Gutierrez’s credibility emerged. It turns out that Gutierrez, like Alvarado, was a zealous anti-Castro activist and thus had a motive similar to Alvarado’s for lying: to convince the United States that Castro was behind the assassination, thus inducing this nation to remove Castro from power. But even if Gutierrez did see two men and heard the three words, Gutierrez conceded he saw “Oswald” face-to-face for only a “split second,” at all other times during the incident only seeing the backs of “Oswald” and the other man.
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On June 5, 1978, HSCA staff member Edwin Lopez interviewed Gutierrez on tape, and all Gutierrez would say is that he bumped into Oswald at the Cuban consulate but “I don’t remember him [Oswald] being accompanied by another person.” When Lopez pressed Gutierrez about the fact that he told President Johnson that he saw Oswald with, Lopez incorrectly says, a Cuban-American (Gutierrez had only said the man was Cuban, not Cuban-American), Gutierrez replied, “That is an enigma to me. I do not remember him being accompanied by a Cuban-American.” When Lopez asked Gutierrez about his assertion that the Cuban handed money to Oswald, Gutierrez said, “I do not ever remember that occurring.”
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So much for Pedro Gutierrez.

So there is no credible evidence connecting Castro, by way of the alleged incidents outside the Cuban embassy, with the assassination. It should be added that even if Castro were able to kill Kennedy without being discovered, he was aware, as he said, “that the death of the leader does not change the system. It has never done that.”
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In other words, what reason would Castro have had to believe that the U.S. posture toward him would be better under LBJ? None. He apparently knew very little about LBJ. According to French journalist Jean Daniel, who was with Castro on the day of the assassination, Castro had a series of questions for him after Kennedy’s death was finally confirmed: “What is [Johnson’s] reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?”
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In a two-hour radio and television address to his people on the evening following the assassination, the Cuban leader said that the assassination of Kennedy was “grave and bad news…from the political point of view” because it could change U.S. foreign policy “from bad to worse.”
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And it wasn’t just Castro who felt this way. An NSA intercept picked up a message on November 27, 1963 (just four days after the assassination), from the Brazilian ambassador to Cuba to his foreign office, stating that Cuban officials “were unanimous in believing that any other president would be even worse” than Kennedy.
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P
erhaps the most direct accusation that Castro was behind Kennedy’s death came from someone whose story was so lacking in credibility that a member of the HSCA, during open proceedings, accused the accuser of blatant perjury.

On May 1, 1961, Antulio Ramirez Ortiz, a U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican origin, boarded a National Airlines flight out of Miami destined for Key West and, using a knife and a gun, hijacked the plane to Cuba. In testimony before the HSCA, Ramirez said that once the plane landed in Havana, Cuba’s secret service police took him to their headquarters but didn’t bother to question him for three or four months. (He claimed that in 1959 he had delivered a phony message for the Cuban secret service to the Dominican Republican consulate in New York City, so Havana knew him.) During that period, he lived at the headquarters and worked in the kitchen. He said a female coworker told him one day that in the room where the secret service stored its files, she had seen a file on him with photos in it. Why she would be looking through those secret files and have access to them he did not know. Out of curiosity, one day he walked into the room (apparently the Cuban secret police had no security and even kitchen employees could peruse their files) and while looking for his file he noticed one labeled “Oswald-Kennedy.” Looking inside, he saw a photo of Oswald and a report written in Russian, in which, he testified, Oswald’s wife was described as “belonging to the Soviet secret police,” and he told the HSCA that “the Russian secret police were recommending this person [Oswald] to the Cuban government.” One big problem is that when HSCA counsel asked Ramirez if he was able to “read Russian,” Ramirez answered, “No,” adding he could recognize some of the Russian characters, however.

But Ramirez’s story gets, as Lewis Carroll said, “curiouser and curiouser,” or, more aptly, sillier and sillier. Ramirez said that from the moment he landed in Havana, the Cuban secret service “thought I was working for the CIA.” Yet not only did the secret service police apparently allow him free run of their headquarters in 1961, but after they arrested him for espionage in September of 1963, instead of imprisoning him, they merely “detained” him for a month. The following month they freed him on condition that he would start working for them. Though he was drawing a “full salary” and they were paying his hotel expenses, when HSCA counsel asked what he was doing in return for this, he replied, “Absolutely nothing.” But wait. The Cuban secret service at least had something important they wanted to share with him. One of the Cuban secret service agents named Martin (Ramirez didn’t know his last name) confided in him over drinks at the Hotel Saratoga in Havana in early November of 1963 that the Cubans intended to kill Kennedy “in this very month of November. Read the papers.”

With the exception of a brief period when he was hospitalized in a mental institution and received psychiatric care, Ramirez continued to float around Havana, leaving in 1975 for the United States. When asked by HSCA counsel how the Cuban government allowed him to leave knowing he possessed information that it had Kennedy killed, Ramirez responded, “Because I had something more valuable than all that. If I were dead, they would have a problem,” though he didn’t elaborate on this. In other words, the Cubans didn’t think they’d have much of a problem if they killed the president of the United States, but thought they’d have real problems killing Ramirez. You don’t say.

When Ramirez arrived in Miami in 1975, the FBI arrested him. He said he never told the FBI what he knew because he was saving the material for a book he intended to write about his experiences. (The five-hundred-page manuscript he eventually wrote, titled “Castro’s Red Hot Hell,” was never published.) After being convicted of hijacking the National Airlines plane, Ramirez was sentenced to twenty years and sent to the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island in Washington State. In April of 1978, he contacted the HSCA with a plan to capture Kennedy’s killers. What Ramirez wanted was to be let out of prison and “set up in a nice cozy place, easy to watch from a distance. If possible, in a not too populated area of California, close to the beach.” From there, he said, he could lure Cuban agent Martin and other fellow agents to where he was for the purpose of killing him (you see, they couldn’t kill him in Cuba, they had to sneak into this country to do so) at which time they could be arrested by the FBI.