Reclaiming History (382 page)

† “What was your reaction to [being asked to kill] President Castro?” Trafficante was asked in his testimony before the HSCA. Trafficante: “Well, at that time I think it was a good thing because he had established a Communistic base ninety miles from the United States, and being that the government of the United States wanted it done, I’d go along with it, the same thing as a war. I figure it was like war.” (5 HSCA 358)
There are many, like Johnny Roselli, who believe that Trafficante never made any attempt to kill Castro. Another who held this belief was Trafficante’s lawyer, Frank Ragano. Ragano says that when the CIA asked Trafficante to kill Castro, he just played along, believing it would be impossible to kill Castro without the killer or killers getting killed themselves. Even though Castro had caused Trafficante and the mob to lose millions of dollars when he closed down the mob-run casinos in Havana, and the mob had every desire to regain control and ownership of its very profitable gambling empire, Trafficante, Ragano said, was “realistic and philosophical,” viewing it as a “lost cause, especially after the Bay of Pigs,” and had no intention of going after Castro for the CIA. “It was just a big scam. There was no intention, no effort whatsoever to assassinate Fidel Castro.” Ragano said Trafficante told him he lied to the HSCA in 1978 when he testified he had tried to kill Castro. (Interview of Frank Ragano, “JFK, Hoffa and the Mob,”
Frontline
, PBS, November 17, 1992; see also a long endnote to the section “Cover-Up by the CIA and FBI in the Warren Commission’s Investigation of the Assassination,” on whether JFK authorized the CIA plots to kill Castro)

^*
Giancana, age sixty-six, was shot twice in the head, once in the region of the mouth, and six times in the neck on June 19, 1975, while he was preparing a late-night snack of his favorite dish, Italian sausage and escarole, in the basement kitchen of his home in the Oak Park area of Chicago. A June 21, 1975, headline story in the
Chicago Tribune
reported that the Oak Park Police Department had been “watching” Giancana’s home at the time of the murder and “the killer who shot Giancana may have passed directly under the gaze of lawmen.” Earlier on the day of the murder, staff members of the Church Committee had arrived in Chicago to make arrangements with Giancana for his scheduled appearance before the committee in Washington, D.C., on June 24, five days away. That morning’s
Chicago Tribune
captioned an article “Report CIA Scheme to Poison Castro” that said “the assassination plot…was directed by Sam Giancana and John Roselli.”
At the time of Giancana’s execution-style murder, he no longer controlled the Chicago mob, having lived in exile in Mexico from 1966 to July 18, 1974, when Mexico deported him, and the Chicago “Outfit” had excluded him from all its activities, “believing that the investigations he had inspired had crimped mob business in Chicago.” However, a federal grand jury in Chicago had recently questioned Giancana about mob activities there, and although he hadn’t yet told the grand jury anything of value, the Chicago mob may have feared he eventually would.
Time
magazine said that “the gang-slaying theory was lent credence by a shadowy report that on hearing of the shooting, the Mafia’s boss of bosses, Carlo Gambino, promptly passed word that Giancana’s killer was to be executed…a frequent Mafia precaution after a major ‘hit.’” (“Demise of a Don,” p.26;
Washington Post
, June 21, 1975, p.1; Giancana, Hughes, and Jobe,
JFK and Sam
, pp.65–66; Blakey and Billings,
Plot to Kill the President
, pp.390–391)

^*
What a terrible irony that the person (Castro) whom Oswald
may
have killed Kennedy for (see discussion under “Motive”) was at that moment in time, unbeknownst to Oswald, wanting to establish a rapprochement with Kennedy, not murder him.

^*
Castro himself, who took a law degree from the University of Havana in 1950 and briefly practiced law in Havana, almost exclusively representing the poor, often without fee, in cases with social and political implications, did not come from the poor of Cuba he sought to help. Born in 1926 in the eastern Cuban province of Oriente, his Spanish-born father fought in Cuba for the Spanish army during the War of Independence in 1898, and stayed on to become a sugar plantation owner of some means, leaving an estate of more than $500,000 when he died in 1956. (NARA Record 176-10011-100189, “Psychiatric Personality Study of Fidel Castro,” Central Intelligence Agency, December 1, 1961, pp.7, 9, 12, 34; Meneses,
Fidel Castro
, pp.32–33, 37)

^*
Bolivar was the Venezuelan revolutionary leader of the early nineteenth century (1783–1830) who led several Spanish colonies in South America in their fight for independence from Spain. The region of northern South America in which he fought now comprises the countries of Bolivia (named in honor of Bolivar), Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia.

† That the U.S. government supported Batista and had a friendly relationship with him right up to (but not during or beyond) the point where Batista’s government was about to fall to Castro’s rebels in late 1958 cannot be disputed. See, for instance, Smith (U.S. ambassador to Batista’s Cuba),
Fourth Floor
, pp.168–176.

^*
Che Guevara’s biographer, Jorge G. Castañeda, writes that the firing squad executions (mostly at Havana’s La Cabaña fortress) have to be seen “within the context of the time. There was no bloodbath…After the excesses of Batista, and the unleashing of passions during those winter months, it is surprising that there were so few abuses and executions” (Castañeda,
Compañero
, pp.143–144). The chief person in charge of the executions was Castro’s younger brother, Raul, described in a 1961 CIA psychiatric study on his brother, Fidel, as “sadistic” (“Cuba: Raul Castro Directly Responsible for 550 Executions,” Truth Recovery Archive on Cuba, undated; NARA Record 176-10011-10189, “Psychiatric Personality Study of Fidel Castro,” Central Intelligence Agency, December 1, 1961, p.5). The United States publicly deplored the mass executions of Batista’s lieutenants, and Castro charged back that the United States had never voiced objections to killing and torture by Batista (HSCA Report, p.104).

† Remarkably, the United States did not object to the confiscation of property, per se, U.S. Ambassador Bonsal telling the Cuban minister of state on June 1, 1959, that the United States supported the Agrarian Reform Law “provided just and prompt compensation” was made. On June 11, the U.S. government told the Cuban government that the Reform Law “gives serious concern to the Government of the United States with regard to the adequacy of provision for compensation” to those whose property was expropriated. (HSCA Record 180-10075-10138, Sklar,
U.S. Cuban Relations
,
1959–1964
, p.CRS-9)

^*
In March of 1959, the Cuban government took over the United States–owned Cuban Telephone Company. In May, in the first large-scale nationalization of foreign-owned companies and industries, the Cuban government began appropriating U.S. companies. By the summer of 1960, Castro had seized more than $700 million in U.S. property. (HSCA Report, p.104)

^*
The letter contains fatherly asides to each one of his beloved children. To Sylvia he writes, “Do not abandon your literature. Persevere. Write a good book even though it takes you years.”

^*
Jeannine Ewing was the secretary to Harry Lane, the executive vice president of sales at National Chemsearch at the time of the assassination. She thinks that Sylvia Odio worked at the company, which had close to 150 employees, for “less than a year.” She went out to lunch several times with Odio and described her as “pleasant and very intelligent.” “Was there anything about her that you would say was goofy or unusual, either in her mannerisms or mentally?” I asked. “Oh, no,” Ewing answered. “But she did say several times that she hated President Kennedy.” Ewing did not personally see Odio faint at work that day, but she knew she did, and heard from others in the office that Odio had said, “I know who did it” just before she fainted. (Telephone interview of Jeannine Ewing by author on February 13, 2006)

† The FBI learned about the Odio incident through Odio’s friend Lucille Connell (HSCA Record 180-10101-10283, April 5, 1976, pp.1–2), who had learned of the incident from Sylvia’s sister Sarita (10 HSCA 28).

^*
In the FBI’s first interview of Odio on December 18, 1963, she said the incident took place in “late September or early October, 1963” (CD 205, p.1).

† Checking bus, train, and airline schedules and records, the Secret Service and FBI were unable to firmly establish how Oswald got to Houston from New Orleans on the first day of his Mexico City trip, and whether he visited Dallas in between (WR, p.323; CE 2131, 24 H 717; CE 3086, 26 H 694–698; CE 3075, 26 H 675–678). A statement in the Warren Report that Oswald had told passengers on the bus to Laredo that “he had traveled from New Orleans
by bus
, and made no mention of an intervening trip to Dallas” (WR, p.324), is an overstatement. The main citation given for this is the affidavit of passengers Mr. and Mrs. John McFarland. Question: “Did he [Oswald] mention any names or places either in the United States or Mexico, in any connection whatsoever?” Answer: “Only New Orleans, whence he said he had come. In the course of conversation, we worked out he must have left New Orleans at about the same time we had left Jackson, Mississippi, i.e., 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 25, 1963.” (11 H 214–215, WC affidavit of Mr. and Mrs. John McFarland) The FBI checked with Greyhound and Continental Trailways bus drivers of all trips out of New Orleans on September 25, 1963 (the date it is believed Oswald left New Orleans), whose destination could have taken Oswald to Laredo, Texas, and none of them were able to recall any passenger resembling Oswald on their trips (CE 2192, 25 H 8).

^*
When an interviewer from the HSCA spoke to Odio on January 16, 1976, and asked her about the possibility that the man at her door merely looked very much like Oswald, she replied, “When you see someone as close as I’m seeing you now, even closer because we were standing by my door for about fifteen minutes and the light was…coming down upon their faces, when I saw him on television I recognized him immediately. And this guy had a special grin, a kind of funny smirk” (HSCA Record 180-10101-10280, January 16, 1976, p.1), the smirk being an identifying characteristic of Oswald so many other people had commented on.

^*
Some have argued that it’s highly unlikely the Cubans would be trying to frame Oswald on September 24, 25, 26, or 27, 1963, when Kennedy’s itinerary for his Texas visit wasn’t announced until November 1, 1963, more than one month later. However, word that the president would be visiting the state first appeared in the Dallas papers on September 13, 1963, and Dallas being the state’s second-largest city, it could be assumed that any trip by the president to Texas would probably include his coming to Dallas. Coincidentally, the September 26 edition of the
Dallas Morning News
had a front-page story on the president’s planned trip to Texas. (HSCA Report, pp.37, 132)

† Conspiracy author Sylvia Meagher writes that Leopoldo “took pains to plant seeds which inevitably would incriminate Oswald in the assassination…so that an anonymous phone call [from framers] would be enough to send the police straight after [Oswald]” (Meagher,
Accessories after the Fact
, p.379). But Meagher doesn’t go on to point out that there is no evidence any such anonymous call was ever made.

^*
Many of those who escaped, after being repulsed on the beaches by Castro’s militia, tanks, and planes, were able to get on small rowboats that drifted to one of the nearby keys, where they subsisted on coconuts, crabs, and salt water until they were picked up days later by an American destroyer (Aguilar,
Operation Zapata
, pp.309, 310). Brigade 2506 was named after the number of the last volunteer who was accepted in Miami to be part of the exile force, Carlos Rodriguez Santana. Santana died in an accident during training in Guatemala. (Rodriguez and Weisman,
Shadow Warrior
, p.54)

^*
By “involved,” the president apparently meant “fighting.” Certainly, we were “involved” to the extent that quite apart from the CIA having 588 personnel assigned to the project, as well as organizing and funding the invasion, five U.S. Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier
Essex
escorted the anti-Cuban invasion force’s seven vessels (carrying the invasion troops and their supplies) to the beaches of the Bay of Pigs by protecting them in the event of attempted interdiction by Castro’s forces (Wyden,
Bay of Pigs
, pp.125, 210, 212, 216; 588 CIA personnel: Kornbluh,
Bay of Pigs Declassified
, p.46).

† “Cuba seems to have the same effect on American Administrations,” Wayne Smith, a former U.S. State Department officer in Havana, said, “as the full moon used to have on werewolves” (McKnight,
Breach of Trust
, p.330).

^*
Actually, the first members of the brigade force (officially called the Cuban Expeditionary Force), led by Brigade Commander José Pérez San Román and two teams of six frogmen each, went ashore at Blue Beach at one hour and fifteen minutes past midnight on Monday morning, April 17 (Aguilar,
Operation Zapata
, p.21; Wyden,
Bay of Pigs
, pp.131, 217–220). Around sunup, 177 brigade paratroopers also landed, dropped from the sky by six brigade C-46s (Wyden,
Bay of Pigs
, p.232).

^*
What Kennedy also did not authorize and only learned about nearly two years later is that on the morning of April 19, the third and final day of the invasion, CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell, in a last-ditch effort to save the invasion, dispatched five American
civilian
pilots and one Cuban exile pilot, all flying B-26s, from the airfield at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, to the Bay of Pigs, five hundred miles away. They were to provide air cover for the brigade already on the beach, fight Castro’s pilots in the sky, and destroy any concentration of Cuban troops and equipment in the combat area. The pilots were all members of the 117th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard in Birmingham who had been enlisted by the CIA in early January of 1961. Twenty other members of a contingent from the Wing were also enlisted to train exile pilots at the Guatemalan air base at Retalhuleu near the Pacific Ocean in the southwestern part of the country and transport the Brigade 2506 invasion force from its training camps in Guatemala to Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the departure point for the invasion. The five American pilots were Riley Shamburger (flying with his observer, Wade Gray—all of the observers were also from the Wing), Thomas “Pete” Ray (with observer Leo Baker), Don Gordon (with Jack Vernon), Bill Petersen (with an exile observer), and Hal McGee (with an unidentified flight engineer from the Wing). The observer for the Cuban exile pilot, Gonzalo Herrera, leaped from the aircraft onto the ground before flight at the Puerto Cabezas air base and fled into the woods, so Herrera flew alone. Though the B-26s inflicted some damage on Cuban forces and supplies on the ground, they were largely ineffective, and two of the American pilots, Shamburger and Ray, together with their observers, Gray and Baker, were shot down over the Bay of Pigs and died. (Persons,
Bay of Pigs
, pp.4–14, 17–18, 71–72, 89–95, 101, 156 [see also
CIA
on page 158 of book’s index, where the author, a member of the Wing contingent, says his employment contract for the mission was with the CIA]; Thomas,
Very Best Men
, pp.261–262; on Bissell authorizing the last-minute effort without Kennedy’s knowledge and Kennedy finding this out two years later: Wyden,
Bay of Pigs
, p.278) Ray’s son, Thomas Ray Jr., a San Francisco attorney, told me that it wasn’t until seventeen years after the invasion that his family got his father’s remains back from Castro. Ray said his father and the other pilots worked “for the CIA,” and that there was only one flight, but the CIA wouldn’t acknowledge this lone flight by CIA pilots “for many years.” (Interview of Thomas Ray Jr. by author on November 21, 1997)