Did Fidel Kill Kennedy?

[Tim Gratz]

To: Robert Charles-Dunne:

In a subsequent post I will argue that with respect to Castro's possible involvement in the Kennedy assassination, it matters not whether Robert F. Kennedy actually had approved of Cubela's plan to "eliminate" Castro. What matters is if Castro believed the representations made by Desmond Fitzgerald (who was using the name "James Clark") to Major Rolando Cubela (whom you agree was a double agent whose allegiance remained with Castro). However, with respect to RFK's knowledge of the Cubela operation, there is this datum that suggests knowledge by RFK: It was on October 11, 1963 that Sanchez cabled to CIA headquarters his request to meet personally with Robert F. Kennedy. 1967 Report of the CIA Inspector General. According to the logs of RFK's phone calls, first released in 1994, there was only one phone call in the fall of 1963 between RFK and Desmond Fitzgerald. That call occured on October 11, 1963, And it has been reported by several that RFK and Fitzgerald were personal friends. In his book, Russo cites interviews with two high level CIA officials who stated that the Kennedys were aware of all the plots against Castro, including the Cubela plot (but of course I understand you will discount any statement made by anyone in the CIA).

[Tim Gratz]

To: Robert Charles-Dunne:

Robert, you had requested a citation for my assertion that LBJ ordered a stop to the clandestine activities against Castro. Here is the citation:

In his memoirs ("Inside", published in 2004), Joseph Califano, who had worked for the Cuban Coordinating Committee under JFK, writes that after he became President Lyndon Johnson ordered the cessation of activities against Cuba. Califano was in part responsible for implementing that order. Califano cites the following: Memo for the Record, by Earle Wheeler, Meeting with the Pesident on Cuba, 1100 hours, 19 December 1963, National Archives, JFK Assassination Record, JCS Papers, 202-10001-10010. In his memoirs, Califano states that he believes that Castro probably sponsored the JFK assasination. That is also the opinion of Gen. Alexander Haig, who worked under Califano on the Cuban Coordinating Committee in the Kennedy Administration.

Edited January 19, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

To: Robert Charles-Dunne, Dawn Meredith, Bill Miller, etc.

Many of you have argued that Castro would not have wanted to kill JFK because, after all, in the fall of 1963, JFK was involved in peace initiatives with Castro. I have argued those initiatives were a feint because the Kennedy administration was plotting not only the assassination of Castro but also a second invasion of Cuba. Given those activities, the peace initiatives seem no more than a sham--similar to the peace negotiations engaged by the Japanese while they secretly plotted Pearl Harbor.

That is not just MY opinion.

As you are all aware, Lisa Howard was the ABC reporter who helped initiate the peace overtures between Washington and Havana.

In 1968, that Lisa Howard formed, with Gore Vidal, an organization called "Democrats for Keating" to support the Republican incumbent whom RFK challenged for the U.S. Senate seat in 1968 (and whom of course RFK ultimately defeated). William Turner, the author of "Deadly Secrets" states that Howard had learned that all the while she was talking peace to Castro for the Kennedys, the Kennedys were secretly indulging in invasion and assassination plans against him, and that probably explains her rabid opposition to RFK's candidacy. (I.e., she thought RFK had "played her for a fool"). "Deadly Secrets", page 222.

Two weeks after Howard's anti-Kennedy activity was publicized, she was fired by ABC News which stated that her engagement in partisan politics violated longstanding corporate policies.

Eight months later Howard was dead of a barbituate overdose, a death some people consider suspicious.

[Tim Gratz]

Robert Charles-Dunne wrote:

Angleton was, after all, the man who protested to the Church Committee that: "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the Government has to comply with all the overt orders of the Govemment."

That is the level of loyalty to the President - the Commander in Chief - that one can expect from the CIA personnel behind these old shenanigans.

Robert, it will not surprise you, I am sure, when I tell you that IMO Angleton was correct about many things.

Including of course the above quote.

Unless, of course, you assert that Richard Helms, out of loyalty to the Commander in Chief, should have obeyed the overt order of Richard Nixon to use the CIA as a shield to obstruct the Watergate investigation.

IMO if a President had directly ordered the CIA to assassinate a foreign head of state the Director of the CIA should have declined.

So do you really believe that the CIA should blindly obey ALL orders of the President, or do you agree that some orders should not be obeyed (which is all that Angleton said--that not ALL orders should be obeyed--a totally defensible position.)

Edited January 19, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

To: Greg Wagner (and others)

Robert Charles-Dunne wrote:

If nothing else, these will help to balance the wholly one-sided viewpoint presented by the books Tim has recommended, the agenda of which is not surprising given the Agency sources upon which the authors rely.

While I think the case presented in such Agency-driven books is knowingly spurious, I encourage students of this case to read everything they can, and reach their own conclusions.

Presumably he is refering to Russo's "Live By the Sword" and Trento's "The Secret History of the CIA". Let me discuss each book separately,

"LIVE BY THE SWORD"

Here is what Michael Griffith wrote about "Live By the Sword".

I would like to stress that, in spite of the problems discussed above, I believe Russo's LIVE BY THE SWORD is an important, worthwhile book. It contains a great deal of new information on key aspects of the JFK assassination. Russo does a superb job on the possible involvement of Cuban intelligence in Kennedy's death, on the reports that Oswald had contacts with Cuban intelligence in Mexico City, on the possibility that some intelligence elements had foreknowledge that Kennedy was going to be killed, on the flaws in the Warren Commission's investigation, on the conflicts among the Warren Commission's staff and members, on Lyndon Johnson's political standing with John Kennedy at the time of the shooting, on the suspicious activities at Red Bird Airport, and on several other subjects. But Russo's devotion to the lone-gunman scenario and his dismissive, hypercritical attitude toward the Jim Garrison investigation cause him to err badly on the Dealey Plaza shooting, on the Shaw-Ferrie-Oswald-Banister link, on the evidence of Oswald's ties to American intelligence, on the evidence that more than one gunman was involved in the assassination, on Jack Ruby and his killing of Oswald, and on much of the physical and medical evidence in the case.

--------------------------------------

I agree with Mr. Griffith. Although Russo's opinions are wrong about several things, the information he presents on the topics to which Griffith refers is indeed superb. If you read it carefully, IMO, you will conclude there is indeed a strong possibility of Cuban involvement in the assassination.

"Live By the Sword", was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, by the way.

"THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA"

To characterize this book as "agency-driven" is ridiculous. It is very anti-CIA and was in fact blasted in the CIA's house organ.

I think every assassination researcher ought to read both of these books.

Oh, by the way, I also find Peter Dale Scott's books intriguing although it has been pointed out that Scott gets some facts wrong--for instance he said that Gordon McLendon was a business partner of Clyde Murchison and he was not, as Jack White pointed out.

Edited January 19, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

To:  Robert Charles-Dunne:

(but of course I understand you will discount any statement made by anyone in the CIA).

"Discount?"  No.  View with skepticism?  Sure. 

You have yourself rightly pointed out that three foreign leaders were CIA targets.  I have pointed out that two were assassinated, and the third's continued existence is baffling; upon which you've passed no comment.  Given CIA's demonstrated will and intent to kill a national leader; given CIA's antipathy toward Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs and other perceived failures of nerve; given CIA's peculiar handling of the entire Oswald episode, in it's files and in the testimony of its personnel; a goodly number of people suspect various CIA operatives of participating in the assassination of their President.

So, will I seek to discern whether CIA personnel and sources are being truthful, or merely peddling self-serving caveats and alibis?

In a word, yes. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

Robert Charles-Dunne wrote:

Angleton was, after all, the man who protested to the Church Committee that: "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the Government has to comply with all the overt orders of the Govemment." 

That is the level of loyalty to the President - the Commander in Chief - that one can expect from the CIA personnel behind these old shenanigans.

Robert, it will not surprise you, I am sure, when I tell you that IMO Angleton was correct about many things.

Including of course the above quote.

Unless, of course, you assert that Richard Helms, out of loyalty to the Commander in Chief, should have obeyed the overt order of Richard Nixon to use the CIA as a shield to obstruct the Watergate investigation.

Seems to me it was more of a blackmail attempt - using the "Bay of Pigs" as a reference, oddly enough - than a Presidential order.  I just can't imagine what that reference was about, can you?

IMO if a President had directly ordered the CIA to assassinate a foreign head of state the Director of the CIA should have declined.

Seems to me that various Agency personnel testified they had "declined" to take on the Trujillo and Lumumba jobs, too.  Yet Agency personnel were dispatched or otherwise involved, and both men did die.  Just pure dumb luck, presumably.  Certainly nothing the Agency did.  In any case, "declining" doesn't seem to make much difference, does it?

So do you really believe that the CIA should blindly obey ALL orders of the President, or do you agree that some orders should not be obeyed (which is all that Angleton said--that not ALL orders should be obeyed--a totally defensible position.)

I believe the CIA should refrain from trying to kill foreign heads of state if they've been expressly forbidden from doing so.  And when caught doing so, despite those orders, I believe they shouldn't be allowed to get away with saying they were only following orders that nobody can seem to locate.

If that seems unreasonable, so be it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

To: Greg Wagner (and others)

Robert Charles-Dunne wrote:

If nothing else, these will help to balance the wholly one-sided viewpoint presented by the books Tim has recommended, the agenda of which is not surprising given the Agency sources upon which the authors rely. 

While I think the case presented in such Agency-driven books is knowingly spurious, I encourage students of this case to read everything they can, and reach their own conclusions. 

Presumably he is refering to Russo's "Live By the Sword" and Trento's "The Secret History of the CIA".  Let me discuss each book separately,

                      "LIVE BY THE SWORD"

 

Here is what Michael Griffith wrote about "Live By the Sword".

I would like to stress that, in spite of the problems discussed above, I believe Russo's LIVE BY THE SWORD is an important, worthwhile book. It contains a great deal of new information on key aspects of the JFK assassination. Russo does a superb job on the possible involvement of Cuban intelligence in Kennedy's death, on the reports that Oswald had contacts with Cuban intelligence in Mexico City, on the possibility that some intelligence elements had foreknowledge that Kennedy was going to be killed, on the flaws in the Warren Commission's investigation, on the conflicts among the Warren Commission's staff and members, on Lyndon Johnson's political standing with John Kennedy at the time of the shooting, on the suspicious activities at Red Bird Airport, and on several other subjects. But Russo's devotion to the lone-gunman scenario and his dismissive, hypercritical attitude toward the Jim Garrison investigation cause him to err badly on the Dealey Plaza shooting, on the Shaw-Ferrie-Oswald-Banister link, on the evidence of Oswald's ties to American intelligence, on the evidence that more than one gunman was involved in the assassination, on Jack Ruby and his killing of Oswald, and on much of the physical and medical evidence in the case.

--------------------------------------

I agree with Mr. Griffith.  Although Russo's opinions are wrong about several things, the information he presents on the topics to which Griffith refers is indeed superb.  If you read it carefully, IMO, you will conclude there is indeed a strong possibility of Cuban involvement in the assassination.

"Live By the Sword", was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, by the way.

                                "THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA"

To characterize this book as "agency-driven" is ridiculous.  It is very anti-CIA and was in fact blasted in the CIA's house organ.

I think every assassination researcher ought to read both of these books.

Which is precisely what I advised, when I encouraged people to read everything.  But, a balanced diet is the healthiest course, hence my own suggestions.

Oh, by the way, I also find Peter Dale Scott's books intriguing although it has been pointed out that Scott gets some facts wrong--

As does Russo, by your own admission.  So?  I've yet to read the perfect book on this topic.  If you have, I'd welcome knowing about it.

for instance he said that Gordon McLendon was a business partner of Clyde Murchison and he was not, as Jack White pointed out.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[Tim Gratz]

In a separate thread, James Richards posted this article by George Crile re "AM/LASH (the CIA code name for Cubela.) A fascinating article as he mentions, worthy of review.

Reportedly Cubela was "spooked" by his murder of Blanco. If indeed Cubela was a Castro "dangle" sent to verify the Kennedys' involvement in the plots to kill Castro (as many people think) I suggest he may not have been informed of Castro's plan to--well, retaliate is not the right word--because if Castro did indeed orchestrate the assassination it was probably motivated to deter existing and future attempts to kill him more than it was to retaliate against previous unsuccessful attempts. I further suggest that Cubela, if a double agent, was a brave man because his life may very well have ben at risk had the CIA concluded he was a double agent.

I wish I could locate the memo from Richard Helms in which he concludes that despite the risk that Cubela was a double agent the CIA should proceed with him because there was yet no PROOF he was a double agent. How foolish a decision!

Thanks, James, for the most interesting article!

The Riddle of AM LASH (by George Crile)

AM LASH is the cryptonym the CIA assigned to the senior Cuban official it had recruited in 1961 to kill Fidel Castro. The Agency's dealings with AM LASH, which continued up to a disastrous end in 1965, encompassed the longest-standing and, on the surface, the most likely to succeed of its numerous plots on Castro's life. It therefore seems a remarkable suspension of curiosity that the Senate Intelligence Committee, in its investigation of the CIA's assassination activities, passed so lightly over this critical chapter.

To begin with, any examination of AM LASH's history would suggest that he had for many years been far too close to insanity to he relied on in any sensitive operation. And from this a larger question presents itself. Was AM LASH actually a conscious double agent for Castro, or was he perhaps so transparent and emotionally exploitable that he unwittingly provided an equivalent service? And if so, and if Castro had become convinced that the United States would stop at nothing to kill him, could Castro have felt compelled to strike first?

AM LASH has never been publicly named. But his history is well known among Cuban exiles in Miami. He was a Cuban doctor, a former commandant of the rebel army, a hero of the revolution: Rolando Cubela, an intimate of Castro. The CIA persuaded the Senate Intelligence Committee not to identify Cubela, who is now in jail in Cuba. It maintains that alerting the Cubans to his role in early CIA plots would expose him to reprisals.

But this argument is specious. The Cuban government is filled with men who know Cubela and his history and who must have read the Church Committee's report. It is difficult to believe that Cubela now has any secrets from his captors. The only people who stand to lain from continued secrecy are those all too eager conspirators at the CIA. For the rest of us this story is essential if we are to begin to make sense of the events surrounding the secret but deadly struggle that was being fought in the autumn of 1963.

TO UNDERSTAND Cubela fully, it is necessary at once to introduce a Cuban exile in Miami, Jose Aleman, whose assertions are sufficiently important to make it worth reviewing his record for reliability.

Aleman was educated in the United States at Worcester Academy and then at the University of Miami. During the 1940s, his father was perhaps the most powerful man in Cuba. Nominally minister of education, he was a heavily guarded boodler and boss, whose most rewarding coup was to back a truck up to the Cuban treasury and make off with the Republic's foreign reserves. In Miami, he bought up most of Key BisCayne, retained Sen. George Smathers as his lawyer and invested as heavily in American politicians as in American real estate.

His son chose a different path. A young, handsome idealist, he became, like Castro, a revolutionary against the Batista regime. While Castro was in the mountains, Aleman was helping to direct the most active and dangerous part of the revolution in Havana. He and four other young men - including Eugenio Rolando Martinez, the Watergate burglar - formed an underground cell that provided the arms for the almost successful attack on the Presidential Palace in 1957. Cubela was then one of the leaders of the student revolutionaries at the University of Havana, and he began to work closely with Martinez and Aleman.

"There were many nasty things we had to do to bring on the revolution," Aleman reflects. The most difficult was the decision to kill Blanco Rico, Batista's chief of military intelligence. The revolutionary logic of that day called for sparing sadistic officials because of the hatred they aroused. "Rico treated everyone like a gentleman. He wouldn't even torture people," Aleman explains. So he had to be done away with. "Rolando [Martinez] and I participated in the decision to get rid of him," and the man whom they assigned to kill him was Cubela.

In October, 1956, Cubela shot Rico through the head in the fashionable Montmartre night club. As he died, Rico caught Cubela's eyes and, Cubela believed, smiled understandingly at him. Cubela escaped to Miami where he moved into the Tradewinds Motel, one of the properties (including also the Miami Stadium) which Aleman owned there.

A large number of revolutionaries had been forced to flee Cuba at that time and many ended up staying at Aleman's expense at the Tradewinds. Cubela was now a hero among these exiles, but he was tortured by the memory of Rico's dying smile. He was convinced that Rico was talking to him at night and he had a nervous breakdown. Martinez, who had also gone into exile, shared a room with him and served as his confessor and analyst. After a few months Cubela appeared to have recovered and returned to Cuba to join Castro's second front in the Escambray mountains. Castro made him a comandante, then the highest rank in the Army, and when Batista fled Cuba on New Year's Day 1959, he swept into Bavaria several days before Castro and led the force that seized the Presidential Palace.

IT IS HARD to imagine the confusion that marked the first y ear of revolutionary government. ;Not all the revolutionaries skip. ported Castro. Many, and particularly those who had worked in Havana, mistrusted Fidel deeply but not more than he mistrusted them. Cubela had always been suspicious of Castro. But now be was one of the towering figures of the revolution, with an independent following. Castro needed his support and Cubela responded to his advances by accepting an offer to become head of the politically powerful federation of students at the University

Cubela exalted in his new-found stains as a triumphant revolutionary. He drove about Havana in a gigantic touring car, drinking and womanizing. He was blissful in his dissipation until he killed a woman in a car accident, and again began hearing Rico at night. As before, he took to calling Aleman whenever he heard the voice.

Aleman, now convinced that Castro was a Communist, had decided that Fidel had to be eliminated. He says that he went with another revolutionary friend to convince Cubela to take on the assignment. He was very upset when we came to him," says Aleman. 'He said, 'I'm a nervous wreck. I'm just getting better, and now you want me to kill Castro. I don't see the Communists, but if I recover, maybe I will - I won't Say yes, I won't say no."' Aleman was then paying for a psychiatrist for Cubela and he persuaded the analyst, who shared his political views, to try to convince Cubela that the only way to exorcise Rico was by assassinating Castro.

The man who accompanied Aleman was Jose (Pepin) Naranjo, an old revolutionary colleague who shared Aleman's mistrust of Castro. But not long after the meeting Castro invited Naranjo to . join his government as minister of interior (director of all the nation's police forces). It was a move on Castro's part to win support among the rival factions of the revolution. Understandably, Aleman was alarmed; he expected to be arrested. But nothing happened. It was a time of political paranoia and Aleman assumed that Naranjo had decided to keep quiet so as not to arouse Castro's suspicion.

When considering the possibility that .the Cubans were aware of Cubela's later CIA plotting, it is worth bearing Naranjo's subsequent story in mind. By 1960 he had risen meteorically to a position of total trust with Fidel: it was he who tasted Castro's food to make sure it wasn't poisoned. Today he is constantly at Fidel's side. In a CBS documentary narrated by Dan Rather last year, Naranjo was seen taking Castro's gun and bandalero from him when Fidel settled back to relax. Somewhere along the line he proved his loyalty and managed to maintain Castro's trust - a not inconsiderable feat given the fact that Cubela was his number two man in the Interior Ministrv at the time of his recruitment by the CIA. It is of some importance that Aleman told me about his meeting with Cubela and Naranjo a full six months before the Senate assassination report made the first public reference to AM LASH.

In 1960, several months after talking to Cubela, Aleman went into exile in Miami. He was to play no further role an Cubela's life. But Cubela himself had by then become a Manchurian candidate, at least vulnerable to the suggestion of killing Castro, but also a colossal security risk to whoever tried to tap his Services, as he was being tapped by the CIA at the time of Kennedy's assassination.

OPERATION MONGOOSE, the secret war that the United States waged against Cuba after the Bay of Pigs, was not a CIA initiative. It was the product of the Kennedys and soon resulted in the establishment in Miami of the largest CIA station in the world with an estimated 400 American case officers and about 2,000 Cuban agents charged with the sole task of destroying Castro. But by 1963 Mongoose was a demonstrable failure. It was at this point that AM LASH emerged as the Agency's last hope to accomplish, with a single blow, the goal that had so stubbornly eluded them.

Cubela's relationship with the Agency had begun at his initiative in 1981 when he contacted both the CIA and the FBI, expressing a desire to defect. But Cubela was the rarest of assets - an agent in the very heart of the enemy system - and the CIA did not want him to leave. His case officer's assignment was to ensure that AM LASH "stay in place and report to us."

At the beginning of September, 1963, Cubela finally agreed to stay if he "could do something really significant for the creation of a new Cuba." He told his case officer he would like to plan Castro's "execution."

It was very shortly after this, on Sept. 7, 1963, that Castro summoned an Associated Press reporter, Daniel Harker, to issue an extraordinary threat: "United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe."

"There can be no question," observed Raymond Rocca, the CIA's liaison officer with the Warren Commission, "that this represented a more than ordinary attempt by [Castro] to get a message on record in the United States." Indeed, it was unprecedented - even for Castro, who was in the habit of making all kinds of accusations and threats in the course of his seven and eight-hour-long speeches.

One possible explanation for the warning was the CIA's recent paramilitary activities in Cuba. After the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962, Kennedy, living up to the spirit as well as the letter of his non-invasion agreement with Khrushchev, had suspended the massive secret war the CIA had been waging against Cuba. But then in August, 1963, he suddenly reversed his position and authorized 15 new commando raids; by the end of the month the Agency had hit two major industrial targets.

But however infuriating such strikes might have been, they hardly endangered Cuban leaders. Could Castro somehow have learned of the CIA's AM LASH plotting? Cubela was not exactly a good security risk; even his case officers were aware of their agent's instability. One described AM LASH's "mercurial" temperament, telling how Cubela had proposed Castro's "execution," only to become deeply disturbed when the case officer used the word "assassination." "It was not the act that he objected to," the case officer wrote, "but merely the choice of words used to describe-it. 'Eliminate' was acceptable."

To the frustrated CIA men running the Cuban secret war it must have seemed an acceptable risk to put up with Cubela's disturbed state of mind. It was certainly worth giving him the assurances he demanded as a precondition to carrying out his plan. According to his case officer, he requested military supplies, a device with which to protect himself if his plots against Castro were discovered and a meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

The meeting was set for Oct. 29. Kennedy did not attend, but Desmond FitzGerald, a social friend of the Kennedys and the CIA man in charge of the Cuban task force, did; he presented himself as Kennedy's personal representative. Cubela was apparently satisfied with FitzGerald's credentials, for the two arranged to meet in Paris again on Nov. 22, when FitzGerald was to give him an assassination device and to finalize plans.

At the meeting that day, FitzGerald gave AM LASH a ballpoint pen rigged with a hypodermic needle the point of which was so fine that its victim would not notice the injection. According to a later CIA inspector general's report, "It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent... and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro."

"This fellow was nothing but a double agent," concluded Sen. Robert Morgan (D-N.C.), a member of the Intelligence Committee who was briefed by William E. Colby, then CIA director, on the AM LASH plot but was told nothing of Cubela's earlier history. "When Colby told us we'd been meeting with AM LASH in Geneva, Paris and Madrid, it occurred to me, how could the guy get out of a little country like this so easily? Colby said he could do it because he was a high official. I asked Colby who he [Cubela] was really working for and Colby said, 'Senator, that's always a problem.' I was struck by how naive these people at the CIA seemed to have been."

But perhaps a more reasonable conclusion, based on Cubela's instability, is that, even if he were not a double agent, the Cubans were at least able to find out what he was conspiring to do. For one thing, the Cuban intelligence - the DGI - and the Soviet KGB are close working partners, and it is unlikely that one or the other organization would have left so senior and peculiar an official as Cubela unsurveyed on his frequent trips abroad.

Cubela's ultimate fate seems to support this theory. According to the CIA inspector general's report, FitzGerald left the meeting "to discover that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Because of this fact, plans with AM LASH changed and it was decided that we would have no part in the assassination of a government leader -including Castro - and would not aid AM LASH in this attempt "

But the CIA did continue to plot with AM LASH for another year. Incredibly, the Agency apparently did not try to find out if there was something beyond coincidence in the simultaneous events in Paris and Dallas. A case officer continued to meet with Cubela until a few months later, when a decision was made to cease all direct contact between Cubela and American case officers, choosing instead to work through exile agents as "cutouts."

"AM LASH was told and fully understands that the United States Government cannot become involved to any degree in the 'first step' of his plan," Cubela's case officer wrote after Kennedy's death. "FYI," he added, "this is where B-1 could fit in nicely in giving any support he would request."

In the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, B-1 is simply described as the leader of an anti-Castro group. In real life he is Manuel Artime, the political chief of the CIA's Brigade 2506 at the Bay of Pigs and after that Kennedy's designated Cuban leader to organize and direct the large CIA-sponsored commando operations run from bases in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. (Airtime is also the godfather of Howard Hunt's son and was actively involved in Hunt's activities at the time of Watergate.)

Up until 1965 Artime's Central American efforts had little if any success. It had taken him month, to get organized, partly because of the Agency's esoteric method of doing business. There were meetings in foreign countries, Swiss bank accounts, arms to be purchased through intermediaries in Luxembourg and through cover corporations. When the MRR (Revolutionary Recovery Movement) finally got under way in 1964, it was a well-trained and equipped force. Artime says that Robert Kennedy sent his congratulations via Artime's case officer after the first commando raid.

But subsequent operations were not successful. Things always seemed to go wrong now that the exiles were left without American case officers to direct them. The Agency provided Artime with up-to-date intelligence, but the raiding parties inevitably would land in the wrong spot, run into bad weather or meet some other obstacle. Morale was low at the camps and there were rumors of smuggling activities and embezzlement of funds. As before, the Cubela plot offered a last hope for a touchdown pass when the game seemed all but lost.

ARTIME openly acknowledges his part in the final Cubela plot. His descriptions of the arrangements made with Cubela, which he related months before the Senate assassination investigation, coincide with all of the senators' findings. Ironically, neither Cubela nor Artime knew that their initial contact had been secretly arranged by the CIA. An inspector general's report explained that the Agency "contrived to put B-1 and AM LASH together in such a way that neither of them knew that the contact had been engineered by CIA. The thought was that B-1 needed a man inside and AM LASH wanted a silenced weapon, which CIA was unwilling to furnish to him directly. By putting the two together, B-1 might get its man inside Cuba and AM LASH might get his silenced weapon from B-1."

Artime, who faithfully reported all of his plans to his case officer, provided Cubela with a silencer and some "small, highly concentrated explosives." The two men worked out elaborate arrangements for Cubela's role in the new Cuban government after the revolution and for the logistics of his escape. Artime was to land with his commandos as soon as Cubela struck. The assassination itself was to be carried out at Veradero Beach, where Castro was planning to spend the Faster holidays at a house once owned by the DuPonts. Cubela stayed at a house close by; from there he planned to use the high powered rifle.

"I had the U-2 photo of the beach," Artime remembers. "At that moment we had 300 boys [his commandos] and I put them all in the mother ships and in the communication ship with the two PT boats ready for the attack. Cubela was supposed to call somebody in New York and say something like 'Look, the tobacco that they smoke now in Miami is not good. The good tobacco is now in Spain because it's the Cuban tobacco.' That would mean Fidel was in the house and the plot was on." The call was to be relayed to the CIA communications bank in Miami and immediately to Artime's commandos at sea. "But the call never came."

The circumstances surrounding the latter Cubela plot were suspicious from the start. By the time the final arrangements were made in 1965, they had become ludicrous. "I think Cubela's real motive was a desire to continue his playboy life;" says Artime. "I met him once in Rome, twice in Spain, and he was always drinking and having a good time. I gave him a lot of money and he spent it like mad." Several of the exiles involved in the plot turned out to be every bit as unreliable. They began to boast about the plan; it became an open secret in Miami.

In June, 1965, the CIA finally terminated all contact with AM LASH and his associates. The explanation cited by the Church Committee report was "for reasons related to security." What apparently alerted the Agency to the questionable nature of the whole enterprise was a strong indication that the Cuban exile agent it had used to put Artime and Cubela together was actually working for Castro.

It was not until the beginning of 1966 that the Cuban authorities got around to arresting Cubela. He was charged with treason, including the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

At his trial in 1966 no one condemned Cubela more harshly than Cubela himself. He called for the maximum sentence for himself - to be shot against the wall - and he seemed to confess to everything. But he did not mention nor did the prosecutors ask him about his earlier CIA plots. There appeared to be a studied attempt to avoid any public mention of Cubela's plotting before 1964. Finally, Castro himself intervened on Cubela’s behalf to ask for clemency. The would-be assassin was sentenced to 25 years in prison but is now reported to be at a state rehabilitation farm.

ALTHOUGH the events presented here strongly suggest that Kennedy and Castro were locked in a fierce secret struggle until the end, there is another, often cited body of thought which believes the two men were seeking a mutual understanding.

For one thing, in the fall of 1963 Castro had intermediaries approach America's deputy U.N. Ambassador William Attwood in an offer to open talks. Kennedy authorized Attwood to take Castro up on the offer and they had agreed to a secret meeting in Cuba. Kennedy had even sent an unofficial peace feed through Jean Daniel, a French journalist who left Washington in mid-November to interview Castro. Daniel, who was lunching with Castro at the moment of Kennedy's death, later portrayed the Cuban as being genuinely shocked and bereaved by the news.

But U.S. Cuban policy since the Bay of Pigs had been boldly and consistently duplicitous, and no man knew this better than Fidel Castro. One need only listen to his fury in October after a hurricane had ravaged Cuba and the CIA had followed with a major commando strike: "What does the United States do as we are mobilizing to recuperate from the hurricane?" he asked rhetorically. "They send saboteurs, arms and pirate ships and explosives… These were not the ordinary counter- revolutionary bands . . . The importance is that it is an action carried out by an organism of the United States government."

Later in the month Castro captures two of the Agency's Cuban commandos, but he waited a full week before forcing them to go on television to confess to their assignments. Coincidentally, this was two days after AM LASH meeting with FitzGerald - the meeting at which AM LASH appears to have become convinced that the Kennedy’s were backing his plot. The commander gave a surprisingly full account of the mission; they even gave the names of their case officers and the location of their bases in Miami. Castro was infuriated by the glib U.S. denials of involvement and by the refusal of the American press to report the attacks even when confronted with evidence they could easily substantiate. "You can see," he railed," that in this free press they boast of, the press, the wire services, the CIA, everyone acts in unison, elaborating and developing the same lie in order to disguise the truth."

Perhaps the central question here is whether Castro knew of Cubela's plotting and thus knew that the CIA and probably much higher authority was still trying to kill him. To Sen. Morgan there is little doubt of this. He thinks Castro, after learning of Cubela's plotting, first tried to deter the CIA with his public warning and that he then retaliated when be learned of Cubela's subsequent meeting with FitzGerald - now believing the Kennedy’s themselves were responsible. "Just exactly how it happened I don't know and I don't know if we'll ever know," but "there is no doubt in my mind that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated by Fidel Castro or someone under his influence in retaliation for our efforts to assassinate him."

One error in the artcle (as in many of the early reports of the Cubela matter). Fitzgerald only met Cubela on Oct 29, 1963. It was Nestor Sanchez who met him on Nov 22, 1963.

Edited January 20, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

I wish I could locate the memo from Richard Helms in which he concludes that despite the risk that Cubela was a double agent the CIA should proceed with him because there was yet no PROOF he was a double agent.  How foolish a decision!

Tim:

It may be that the decision was merely "foolish." 

However, there is reason to suspect that this foolishness was deliberate.

If Cubela had been a double agent, then it seems consorting with him in plans to murder Castro - with an apparent, but spurious White House imprimatur - should have made Castro reassess whether the Howard/Daniel/Attwood clandestine "peace" overtures by Kennedy were genuine.  Under this scenario, Castro quite reasonably could have decided there was no use in pursuing a normalization of relations with a President who simultaneously sought to kill the Cuban leader.

End result?  The destruction of any hope for a peaceful resolution of the two countries' differences, which is what Kennedy appeared anxious to achieve, and what CIA was anxious to thwart.

If so, it is yet another instance of CIA interference with a President's policies.

Please do recall that the Francis Gary Powers flight was green-lighted by CIA, against Eisenhower's specific orders.  End result?  No summit between Ike and Nikita.

Please do recall Frank Bender exhorting his Cuban exile charges to disregard any "abort" order from the White House, immediately prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Please do recall CIA's continuing efforts to kill Castro, despite having been ordered to cease and desist.

Please do recall that those efforts to kill Castro continued to use Mob surrogates and proxies, without White House knowledge, despite having been expressly forbidden from doing so.

CIA personnel are great at suggesting, after the fact, that they were only following orders, while in fact disobeying them.

How many times must we see evidence of CIA's direct insubordination and refusal to follow Presidential orders before we ackowledge it?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[Ron Ecker]

A mention was made in this thread about the assassination of presidential candidates and civil rights leaders. I think this is highly relevant to the question of whether Castro had JFK assassinated.

I think it is safe to say that the same agencies that killed JFK also killed MLK and RFK. These political assassinations of the 1960s were not copy-cat crimes. They involved the same means (shooting the victim and framing a lone nut), motive (Vietnam and civil rights were issues connecting all three victims, plus RFK posed the threat of reopening the JFK case), and opportunity (who was going to stop them?), plus the power, virtually absolute, to cover up the crime in all three cases.

So the question: Did Castro have King and RFK killed too? I doubt it. I think the fingerprints of a couple of homegrown U.S. agencies are all over these crimes.

Ron

[John Simkin]

A mention was made in this thread about the assassination of presidential candidates and civil rights leaders. I think this is highly relevant to the question of whether Castro had JFK assassinated.

I think it is safe to say that the same agencies that killed JFK also killed MLK and RFK. These political assassinations of the 1960s were not copy-cat crimes. They involved the same means (shooting the victim and framing a lone nut), motive (Vietnam and civil rights were issues connecting all three victims, plus RFK posed the threat of reopening the JFK case), and opportunity (who was going to stop them?), plus the power, virtually absolute, to cover up the crime in all three cases.

So the question: Did Castro have King and RFK killed too? I doubt it. I think the fingerprints of a couple of homegrown U.S. agencies are all over these crimes.

Interesting post. Maybe it deserves its own thread.

[Tim Gratz]

To: Ron Ecker

What proof, if any, exists that the same conspirators killed JFK, RFK and MLK?

It is possible--but unlikely--that Castro had RFK killed--but I seriously doubt that he had MLK killed.

In another Forum, John has reviewed a book that argues, apparently convincingly, that Aristotle Onassis engineered the RFK assassination.

Why was JFK killed?

John argues that it may have to do with his intention to eliminate the oil depletion allowance. I see no connection between the oil depletion allowance and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jim Garrison and others argue that JFK was killed because he intended to withdraw from Vietnam. Again, that seems unrelated to the MLK assassination.

Unless you argue that JFK was killed by Southern racists the relationship between the three assassinations seems murky at best.

Moreover, we still have the whole Cubela affair, coupled with Fidel's September 7, 1963 warning, and the presence in Texas of the Cuban DGI agent and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, each of whom fled to Cuba within a week after the assassination. These facts do not disappear merely because of an assertion linking the assassinations of RFK and MLK to the JFK assassination.

[Ron Ecker]

Tim,

I look at the whole history of political murder in America from 1963 on, and apply common sense to the repetitive evidence. Who benefited in each case, and who covered up in every case? JFK (MIC benefited), MLK (MIC and right wingers benefited, silencing a strong anti-Vietnam and civil rights voice), RFK (MIC benefited, an extension of JFK coverup), Reagan (failed attempt, CIA/Bush would have benefited), Vince Foster (Clinton regime benefited), Ron Brown (Clinton regime benefited), 9/11 (Bush regime benefited), Paul Wellstone (Bush regime benefited). I'm sure this list is incomplete, but is there a pattern here? It looks like the U.S. government as Murder Inc. In any event, it has been the U.S. government covering up for Murder Inc. in every case. Where's Castro or Onassis in all this? Nowhere.

The Castro agents you bring up are certainly intriguing. It suggests there could have been a Castro plot. Was it simultaneous with a U.S. government plot? Or was a Castro plot allowed to proceed by the U.S. government? Whatever the answer, it was the U.S. government, not Castro, who covered up the assassination, and it's the U.S. government that has been covering up assassinations in the U.S. ever since.

Of course there are people who say I'm paranoid and they could be right. I'm not a psychologist, but I've always heard that people who are crazy don't know it.

Ron

[John Simkin]

I look at the whole history of political murder in America from 1963 on, and apply common sense to the repetitive evidence. Who benefited in each case, and who covered up in every case? JFK (MIC benefited), MLK (MIC and right wingers  benefited, silencing a strong anti-Vietnam and civil rights voice), RFK (MIC benefited, an extension of JFK coverup), Reagan (failed attempt, CIA/Bush would have benefited), Vince Foster (Clinton regime benefited), Ron Brown (Clinton regime benefited), 9/11 (Bush regime benefited), Paul Wellstone (Bush regime benefited). I'm sure this list is incomplete, but is there a pattern here? It looks like the U.S. government as Murder Inc. In any event, it has been the U.S. government covering up for Murder Inc. in every case. Where's Castro or Onassis in all this? Nowhere.

The Castro agents you bring up are certainly intriguing. It suggests there could have been a Castro plot. Was it simultaneous with a U.S. government plot? Or was a Castro plot allowed to proceed by the U.S. government? Whatever the answer, it was the U.S. government, not Castro, who covered up the assassination, and it's the U.S. government that has been covering up assassinations in the U.S. ever since.

Of course there are people who say I'm paranoid and they could be right. I'm not a psychologist, but I've always heard that people who are crazy don't know it.

Take it from me Ron that you are indeed sane. Anyone who has studied political assassinations in America can see this clear pattern. I would take it back further. What about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln? He was replaced by another Johnson who did not share the political objectives of the former president. Nor is it a coincidence that Lincoln was murdered by a group of Southerners who got what they wanted out of the assassination.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlincoln.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAjohnsonA.htm