LBJ After JFK: The First 72 Hours

[James DiEugenio]

Des Fitzgerald wrote a letter to Johnson weeks after JFK was killed.

He told him that what was left of the anti Cuba operations was so small, and so inept that he thought it was counterproductive.  In other words, we were helping Castro. He strongly recommended that it just be dropped.  And I think LBJ took that to heart.

The idea that what Fitzgerald described in that letter could have caused a coup in Cuba is simply ridiculous.

Waldron is so wed to his ideas that even when they are shown to be wrong, he still insists that he is correct. I know this from firsthand encounters with him. And I guess so does Larry.

[Michael Griffith]

1 hour ago, Larry Hancock said:

Mike, Bobby did go back to LBJ and ask him to support the Cuba projects that were already underway or at least getting started militarily but I think that was two or three months after the assassination.  LBJ was lukewarm about it and none of the projects were cancelled immediately,  AMWORLD began military operations in late spring and continued well until 1965.  Several of the other SAS/WAVE anti-Castro activities continued over the same two years but over time funding got reduced, people got pulled to go to SE Asia - basically LBJ had no interest in Cuba and began to be consumed by  SE Asia.

Its not so much that Lamar's facts about various activities related to a potential coup are wrong per se, its just that he pulls it all together into one consolidated operation, and added a chronology which just does not work with what we know now from actual CIA operations documents, not to mentions documents from the covert actions oversight group or the interdepartmental Cuba project JFK was sitting in on over that period. 

Basically in early 1964 RFK made a pitch to support all anti-Castro operations with the same level of endorsement and attention JFK had and Johnson was just not going to do that (actually at that point  you would have been hard pressed given the memos we now see to find anybody in AMWORLD or at WAVE that thought any of the projects had any chance of success).

I cover the history/chronology of AMWORLD in considerable detail in Shadow Warfare and cite sources which include both documents and various newspaper articles which began to show up as Artime's activities became pretty well known,  not the guy to pick to lead a covert/deniable operation. That is the best place for a list of sources.

Lamar and I both discovered AMWORLD independently, about the same time, and actually he asked me to hold back writing about it as his book was coming out...I didn't know where he was taking it and was shocked by the book.  Stu and I both made our issues known as we were in pretty constant contact with him for some time around then and it was all done with no hard feelings but I haven't been in touch with him for years now.

Thank you for the follow-up. Very interesting and informative.