The Annals of Unsolved Crime (35 page)

Meanwhile, to deal with Castro on his own terms, JFK set up in the White House the “Special Group (Augmented),” headed by his brother Robert, to use covert tactics to dispose of Castro. Infuriated by this humiliating failure, Kennedy summoned the CIA’s director of clandestine operations, Richard
Bissell, to the Cabinet Room and chided him for “sitting on my ass and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime,” as later Bissell testified.

The name of the CIA unit responsible for covert actions against Cuba was changed from JM WAVE to the Special Affairs Section, or, as it was called in CIA memos, SAS. The CIA executive who became its head was Desmond FitzGerald, a trusted ally of Robert Kennedy. His rugged good looks and surname led many people in Washington to mistakenly believe he was a distant relative of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In February 1962, JFK approved “Operation Mongoose,” which covert warfare specialist general Edward Lansdale would run under the supervision of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

As part of the Kennedy-led reorganization of the CIA, Bissell was replaced by Richard Helms, a career CIA officer, who described Operation Mongoose as a “no-holds-barred” enterprise. It included such “planning tasks” as using biological and chemical warfare against Cuban sugar workers; employing Cuban gangsters to kill Cuban police officials, Soviet bloc technicians, and other people; using infiltrators to sabotage mines; and, in what was called “Operation Bounty,” paying cash payments of up to $100,000 for the murder or abduction of government officials.

Castro responded by allowing the Soviet Union to establish missile bases in Cuba. The first shipment of medium-range missiles armed with megaton nuclear warheads arrived on September 8, 1962, followed by a second shipment the next week. Then, on October 15, 1962, high-altitude photographs taken by the CIA’s U-2 planes revealed the presence of these missiles in Cuba, which nearly led to a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Threatened with nuclear war, the Soviet Union withdrew all forty-two missiles, and the United States agreed not to intervene in Cuban affairs.

Although this deal ended the missile crisis and Operation
Mongoose, JFK was still determined to eliminate Castro. The point man remained FitzGerald at the CIA’s SAS. Initially, FitzGerald assumed that the technological ingenuity of the CIA’s workshop would produce a means either to discredit or to kill Castro. Since Castro was an avid diver and seashell collector, it worked on a booby-trapped seashell. The idea was to place it where Castro frequently swam underwater in the hope that he would see it and attempt to bring it to the surface. If so, he would be blown up, and it would appear that he had been killed by a derelict mine. It would leave no witnesses, and unlike hitmen, no assassin that could be captured. And if Castro ignored it, nothing would be lost. The workshop, however, decided that the construction of such a lethal seashell was technically too difficult. Another idea out of the workshop was a killer gift for Castro, a wetsuit whose breathing apparatus was impregnated with tuberculosis bacilli. The concept was that the implanted bacilli, the only evidence of the assassination, would be destroyed by the seawater, and the Cubans would not be able to determine how Castro contracted tuberculosis. Again, this device would leave no witnesses. The problem was to find a means of delivering it. At the time, James Donovan, an American lawyer, was negotiating the release of the Cuban exiles captured in the Bay of Pigs disaster. The CIA’s idea was that somehow Donovan, who was not privy to its machinations, could be induced by the CIA to give the contaminated suit to Castro as a gift. But before it could be delivered, Donovan, acting on his own, coincidentally gave Castro a pristine wetsuit. The plan then had to be aborted.

August of 1963 had been especially hot for the CIA. Richard Helms said he could feel “white heat” from Attorney General Robert Kennedy after yet another of the CIA’s coup d’état attempts against Castro failed to materialize. Helms recalled almost daily phone calls from the attorney general wanting to know if he was taking action to remove Castro from power. As
the CIA inspector general’s report noted, “We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime.” At the time, the CIA had one candidate who both showed a willingness to carry out an assassination and had direct access to Castro. The CIA had broken off contact with him a year earlier, in August 1962, because he had turned down a CIA request that he submit to “fluttering,” the CIA’s term for a polygraph or lie-detector examination, which was then a standard CIA procedure for protecting against a double agent. At the time, he seemed too great a risk. In September 1963, under relentless pressure from Robert Kennedy, Helms authorized his reactivation. Codenamed AMLASH, his real name was Rolando Cubela.

II. THE ASSASSINS

Rolando Cubela Secades was born in Havana in 1933. After completing medical school in 1956, he joined Castro’s mountain guerrillas in fighting Batista’s army and became an early comrade-in-arms of Castro. He proved his mettle on October 27, 1956, by assassinating Antonio Blanco Rico, the head of Batista’s secret police, and in March 1957, he took part in a bloody assault on the presidential palace in which five of Batista’s guards were killed. Castro made him head of the Student Directorate, which took control of the presidential palace after Batista fled on New Year’s Eve, 1958. Cubela, given the rank of major in Castro’s new Cuban army, was put in command of Castro’s youth organizations. In 1961, as head of the Cuban chapter of the International Federation of Students, he was able to carry out sensitive missions abroad for Castro. His close proximity to Castro led him into an intelligence game with the CIA in the early 1960s. As early as March 1961, he sent word to
the CIA through another agent claiming that he wanted to defect, but the CIA took no action. Then, on July 30, 1962, while attending an international conference on youth in Helsinki, he met with a CIA officer and offered his services. The offer of a close friend of Castro’s to secretly serve America was not one that the CIA could refuse. As the CIA inspector general’s
Report on Plots to Assassinate Castro
later recounted in detail, Cubela, under the code name AMLASH, said he would “execute” Carlos Rodriguez, one of Castro’s key operatives, and also blow up the Soviet Embassy for the CIA. So at a time when the CIA was searching for an inside man in Havana, Cubela was volunteering to work for it as an assassin and bomber. The CIA declined to take him up on his offer.

A year later, in September 1963, Cubela received word that the CIA again wanted to see him in Brazil. So began his extraordinary mission.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born on October 18, 1939, at the Old French Hospital in New Orleans. His father, Robert E. Lee Oswald, an insurance-premium collector named after the Civil War general, had died of a heart attack two months before. Since he had problems at school, on October 24, 1956, having just turned seventeen, he joined the U.S. Marines. In October 1960, after receiving a hardship discharge from the Marines, he defected to the Soviet Union. He spent nearly eighteen months in Moscow and Minsk, and he married a Russian woman, Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova. He then returned to the United States in June 1962 with Marina and moved to Dallas. Ten months later, he attempted his first assassination. His target was General Edwin A. Walker, who had been forced to resign from the Army because of his open support for right-wing extremist causes. Walker had also called for an American invasion of Castro’s Cuba. Walker lived in the upscale Turtle Creek section of Dallas. On March 10, 1963, Oswald used his Imperial
Reflex camera to photograph the alley behind Walker’s house. According to Marina’s later testimony, he put the photographs and other information into a journal that he kept in his study. He then ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a telescopic sight from Klein’s Sporting Goods Store in Chicago, using the alias “A. Hidell.” On April 10, 1963, Oswald left a note for his wife instructing her to go to the Soviet embassy if he was killed or captured by the police. He then, according to Marina’s testimony, went to General Walker’s house, fired at him, and returned home at 11:30 p.m. The shot missed only by inches, but, with police investigating the assassination attempt in Dallas, Oswald fled to New Orleans.

III. APPOINTMENTS

Porto Alegre, Brazil. September 5–8, 1963.

Nestor Sanchez, a Spanish-speaking CIA case officer, flew to Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the first week of September 1963. He had been dispatched there by SAS chief Desmond FitzGerald to offer Cubela a highly sensitive assignment. The Brazil meeting had been prearranged through a third party in Havana. Cubela would be in Porto Alegre from September 5 to 8, representing Castro at the Pan American Games. At the meeting, Cubela discussed possible ways for the CIA to approach Cuban military officers. He then suggested almost precisely what the CIA had been under pressure to accomplish: the elimination of Castro himself, a prerequisite to regime change. As a candidate for the mission, Cubela seemed almost too perfect: a trusted colleague of Castro, with direct access to him, who had carried out a prior assassination. Sanchez now asked the key question: Would Cubela be willing to carry out an elimination mission for the CIA? Cubela responded that he would consider such a
mission if he knew it had been properly authorized by President Kennedy.

The next day, Sanchez returned to Washington to speak to his superiors. Cubela returned to Havana.

Havana, Cuba. September 7, 1963.

When the CIA made its approach to Cubela, it was unaware that Cubela had an undisclosed motive for meeting Sanchez. He was what is called in the intelligence game a “dangle,” or double agent. In this wilderness of mirrors, Cubela was dispatched by Castro’s intelligence service, the DGI, to make contact with the CIA, feign disloyalty to Castro, and report back on what he gleaned from his meetings. It was not until 1992, nearly thirty years later, that the CIA learned from a defector the truth about Cubela. The defector, Miguel Mir, had served in Castro’s security office in Havana prior to his defection to the United States, and he reviewed Cubela’s intelligence file, which showed Cubela was working as a double agent under the control of Cuban intelligence when he met with the CIA in Brazil. His mission was to report back to Havana on the CIA’s offer to him. If so, Castro would have learned by or before September 7, 1963, that the CIA had attempted to recruit an assassin.

That very day, September 7, Castro went to the only piece of Brazilian territory in Havana, the Brazilian embassy. It was holding a reception attended by the international press. When he arrived, Castro sought out Daniel Harker, the U.S. correspondent for the Associated Press, and gave him an extraordinary scoop in an on-the-record interview. He warned U.S. leaders against “aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders,” adding that, if they did so, “they themselves will not be safe.” It implied an ominous threat. Harker’s story was sent out by the AP and made headlines in newspapers around the world.

Washington, D.C. September 8–12, 1963.

Castro’s message unsettled the CIA. Ray Rocca, the chief of research on the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, immediately brought it to the attention of his boss, James Jesus Angleton. Angleton, as he later told me, did not believe that it was a coincidence that less than twenty-four hours after the CIA had approached a possible candidate to eliminate Castro in Brazil, Castro had taunted the U.S. at the Brazilian embassy about such plots. Angleton took it as evidence that Castro knew of the plot that the CIA had hatched in Brazil. According to Angleton, by continuing the attempt to recruit Cubela, the CIA could give Castro evidence of the involvement of the highest echelon of American government in the assassination plot. He sent a memo to FitzGerald saying that he considered the operation “insecure.”

The threat of reprisals against American leaders had to be considered and evaluated by the Kennedy Administration. The CIA’s covert activities against Cuba, under the direct supervision of a special group in the National Security Council that was augmented by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor, designated a special committee composed of FitzGerald and a representative of both the Attorney General and the Secretary of State to weigh the risks involved in proceeding with covert actions against Cuba.

The committee met at 2:30 p.m. at the Department of State on September 12 for a “brainstorming” session, as it was described in the memorandum of the meeting, which concluded that although “there was a strong likelihood that Castro would retaliate in some way,” it would probably be at “a low level.” The specific possibility of “attacks against U.S. officials” was assumed to be “unlikely.” Shortly after this review, FitzGerald, disregarding Angleton’s warning, ordered Sanchez to continue with the efforts to recruit Cubela.

New Orleans. September 9, 1963.

On September 9, 1963, Castro’s message reverberated in New Orleans. The AP story by Harker was splashed across three columns in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, the local newspaper read by Lee Harvey Oswald. Castro’s warning presumably would have been of great interest to Oswald. According to Marina, Castro was his hero. Oswald had also opened a branch office of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an organization dedicated to opposing U.S. policy toward Cuba. He had gone on local talk radio and handed out leaflets on the street to show his support for Castro, and these pro-Castro activities had brought him to the attention of the local police, which arrested him briefly, and even called the FBI. At one point that summer, Oswald considered hijacking an airliner and forcing it at gunpoint to fly to Havana, as his wife later divulged. Not only did Castro now raise in the press the specter of American assassination plots directed against him, but he suggested that Cuba might need to retaliate. Oswald, who, according to Marina, spent hours practicing with his rifle in the backyard, now swung into action.