The historian Fawn Brodie was verbally briefed in 1978 by Dr. Jack Pfeiffer, then the CIA historian, following his review of agency files on Nixon and Cuba. Brodie’s notes indicate that in January 1960, just after Western Hemisphere Division chief, J. C. King, first proposed Castro’s “elimination,” Nixon’s aide General Cushman asked at a meeting, “If you need to get some goon squads into Cuba, why don’t you do it?”
That March Nixon was personally briefed on the use of “goon squads.” What the squads were to do is not stipulated in the notes, but the dictionary definition of “goon” is a man “hired to . . . eliminate opponents.”6 That same month, and on later occasions, Nixon’s friend William Pawley discussed with the head of the CIA’s exile-training program the killing of an unnamed “somebody” inside Cuba.
Also in March, at the dinner party at which he had proposed flooding Cuba with forged currency, the author Ian Fleming offered a solution to the Cuban problem gentler than murder. Ridicule, he reckoned, would be as good a way as any to destabilize Castro. If bombarded with propaganda warning of radioactive residue that would linger in their beards and render them impotent, Castro’s followers—and El Líder Máximo himself—would hasten to shave. With its best-known symbol gone, the revolution would wither away.
On the heels of this wacky suggestion, the CIA began its most fatuous anti-Castro schemes. CIA technicians seriously considered how a woman’s depilatory, one that worked either orally or by absorption through the skin, might be administered to him. Would it work to dust it into the Cuban leader’s shoes, in powder form, when the footwear was left out for shining during a foreign trip? We shall never know, because Castro canceled the trip in question.
The agency’s boffins also turned their attention to how to impregnate Castro’s food—or a box of his favorite cigars, Montecristo No. 1 brand—with a chemical that would leave him disoriented and looking foolish during one of his marathon speeches. A CIA in-house history says Nixon was briefed on these famously silly plots. Soon, though, the ludicrous turned to the lethal when the CIA’s Office of Medical Services was asked to contaminate a box of Montecristos with a botulin toxin “so potent that a person would die after putting one in his mouth.” By the time the poisoned cigars were ready, it was established policy that Castro was to be murdered.
Howard Hunt made four recommendations in an April report to his CIA superiors. The first was: “Assassinate Castro before or coincident with the invasion (a task for Cuban patriots).” Hunt later denied knowing if the CIA had taken up this suggestion. “I myself never heard of the plots until the Church Committee revealed them,” he told the author in 1996. According to Nixon’s aide Charles Colson, however, Hunt had informed him of the efforts to kill Castro much earlier. Also, in 1974, in an internal memo purloined by a CIA source from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, then about to publish Hunt’s second volume of memoirs, Hunt was quoted as saying he “recommended and planned assassination/Castro operation.”* 7
In his 1996 interview Hunt confirmed that his proposal that Castro be killed had been discussed at his June meeting with Nixon’s aide General Cushman. He had raised the topic, he said, “like dropping it into a well.” It is logical to conclude that Cushman would have passed the information on to Nixon; it was after all his responsibility to do so.
The CIA file on William Pawley, who also wanted Castro dead, includes a document filed just two weeks after the Hunt-Cushman meeting. The heavily censored message, sent to Allen Dulles, reports an offer by a Cuban contact of Pawley’s to collaborate in Castro’s assassination. Five days later, on July 18, Pawley wrote to Nixon: “I’m in touch with Dulles’ people almost daily and things are shaping up reasonably well. The matter is a very delicate problem and every care should be taken to handle it so as not to affect our Nation adversely, nor our political campaign.”
“For a secret assassination,” a CIA training manual had advised in the fifties, “the contrived accident is the most effective technique.” Two days after Pawley’s letter to Nixon, CIA headquarters responded to a suggestion by an Air Cubana pilot that he might be able to arrange an “accident” to kill Castro’s brother Raúl. “Possible removal top three leaders is receiving serious consideration at HQS,” a cable notified the CIA’s Havana station, promising the pilot a ten-thousand-dollar reward should he succeed in killing Raúl. A few hours later a second cable rescinded the message, in part perhaps because it had flouted another provision in the agency manual: that “assassination instructions should never be written or recorded.”
This aborted plot had in fact been ordered by Pawley’s friend division chief J. C. King and by Tracy Barnes, the number two headquarters man on Cuba and a key figure in the fake peso operation to which Nixon was privy. The Operation Pluto field chief liaising with Nixon’s office, Jacob Esterline, was also told about it.
Meanwhile, also in 1960, a more exotic plot was hatched. A close Pawley associate, Alexander Rorke, spent months cultivating a dark-haired young woman, just twenty years old, named Marita Lorenz. The daughter of a German sea captain and an American mother, Lorenz had unique qualifications to take part in a Castro murder conspiracy. The previous year, on a visit to Havana aboard a cruise liner skippered by her father, she had met Castro, then thirty-three. Soon afterward, summoned back to Cuba, she had done office tasks for him and become his lover. Within weeks she was pregnant—by Castro, according to Lorenz8—but the romance ended soon and unhappily. Lorenz wound up back in New York, recovering from a bungled abortion and badgered by U.S. agents determined to get her to become what one reporter later called “the Mata Hari of the Caribbean Cold War.”
Pawley’s friend Rorke, a former FBI agent now apparently in cahoots with the CIA, filled Lorenz with notions of religion and sin, ending up by persuading her, in her words, that “if I eliminated Fidel, I could make myself right with God.” In Florida that summer, she has claimed, she met a CIA officer known to anti-Castro fighters as Eduardo. This was the name Howard Hunt used, and years later Lorenz would claim she was certain that Eduardo had been one and the same as the man who organized the Watergate break-ins.
Rorke also introduced her to Frank Sturgis, likewise to win notoriety as a Watergate burglar. A former marine who had once fought alongside Castro in the mountains, Sturgis was now his avowed enemy. It was Rorke and Sturgis, said Lorenz, who convinced her to return to Havana—apparently in the spring of 1960—armed with two poison capsules. Her mission was to slip them into one of Castro’s drinks. The poison was odorless and tasteless, the plotters assured her, and death would come quickly.
The operation went wrong, as would all the Castro murder plots, in a manner straight out of movie melodrama. Afraid she would be searched at the airport, Lorenz hid the capsules in a jar of cold cream. Reunited with Castro in his suite at the Havana Libre, the old Hilton Hotel, she felt “torn by feelings of love and obligation.” Behind the closed bathroom door she dug the capsules out of the cold cream only to find them glutinous and greasy, in no state to slip unnoticed into Castro’s coffee. The frightened young woman flushed them down the drain and returned to the room to watch her lover sleeping. She returned to Miami the next morning, to face the rage and scorn of her American mentors.
Sturgis, who had told Lorenz that her mission was a CIA-backed operation, confirmed years later she had indeed been sent to Cuba with the poison. In an October 1960 memo, moreover, FBI Director Hoover warned the CIA that word had leaked of an impending operation to kill Castro, an operation that called for “a girl, not further described, to drop a ‘pill’ in some drink or food of Castro’s.”9
The Lorenz fiasco, too, turns out to have a Nixon connection. CIA records released in 1994 include material on June Cobb, an American woman who had worked in Cuba alongside Lorenz and had known of the young woman’s abortion. In the spring of 1960 a CIA agent induced Cobb to return to the United States, where she was questioned and then surveilled as she met and talked with people immersed in the Cuba intrigues. They included Marita Lor
enz and Rorke, not long before Lorenz left on the murder mission to Havana. Related documents appear in the CIA file on William Pawley. The routing on another, dated a week after the CIA brought Cobb out of Cuba, shows that it originated in Nixon’s office, on the desk of General Cushman.
When she worked in Castro’s office, Cobb had worked as assistant to its director, Juan Orta. Orta was to be the man at the heart of the next and best-documented of all the Castro murder intrigues, the CIA-Mafia plots.
In August 1960, as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe established, the CIA began conspiring with U.S. Mafia bosses to murder Castro—with the knowledge and authorization of Director Dulles, according to two of the senior officials involved. The key contacts on the Mafia side, Sam Giancana of Chicago and Santo Trafficante of Florida, both had interests in Havana’s gambling and crime rackets. The casinos in Cuba were still operating at that point, although under severe restrictions, and Trafficante regularly traveled to the island from Florida. After meeting with a senior CIA officer—Giancana introduced himself as Sam Gold and Trafficante as Joe, the courier—the mobsters agreed to try to locate someone in Castro’s entourage to carry out the killing.
CIA technicians worked to perfect the poison of choice—botulin again, this time in a form that would dissolve in a drink and produce a “firmly predictable end result.” The gangsters settled on Orta as the best candidate for the role of assassin. As head of Castro’s office he had the necessary access, or so they believed, and he was known to be corruptible, having taken kickbacks from casino bosses in the past. It was not until February 1961, early in the Kennedy presidency, that the pills would finally reach Orta, by which point he would have been fired.10
Next, poison pills were supplied to Antonio de Varona, a former prime minister and now a key figure in the exile leadership, whose financial backers included Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante. Varona claimed to have a contact in a Havana restaurant that Castro frequented but—in another absurd setback for the plotters—the Cuban leader stopped eating there. As his long-term survival was to prove, Castro had a charmed life, and very good security. The CIA-Mafia plots would be revived the following year, but this was the last assassination conspiracy initiated while Nixon was vice president.11
Varona consulted regularly with Howard Hunt, and both he and the CIA officer involved in the Mafia operations were in touch with William Pawley. Hunt and Pawley of course were regularly in contact with Nixon or his staff. Other clues, some tentative and some specific, also suggest a Nixon connection to the CIA-Mafia conspiracies.
It is likely that the earliest murder proposals had come to the CIA from the mob.12 Varona said he met in summer 1960 with Lansky, the real brain behind the Cuban rackets and the mobster said to have suggested Castro’s assassination immediately after Batista’s fall. Other initial contacts with the CIA were reportedly made by the man who had operated the Sans Souci casino, Norman Rothman. As described in a previous chapter,* Rothman had earlier played a central role in the gambling scandal involving Nixon and one of his friends and claimed he had covered up for Nixon. In his view, Nixon owed him a favor.
Scattered among Nixon’s vice presidential papers are fragments of semicoded exchanges, apparently about Cuba. They include, for example, a note from Pawley referring to the “problem we are having south of Miami,” and one file contains a letter to Nixon from Marshall Diggs, the vice president’s go-between with the exile leader Mario Kohly. Dated July 29, 1960, it speaks of keeping “in close contact with the General regarding the Caribbean situation. . . . Senator Brewster and his associates are thoroughly familiar with everything that has been done. They are prepared if the possible out can be found.” Nixon’s reply said Diggs’s suggestions had been “passed to the responsible officials for their consideration.”
On August 1 Diggs’s secretary wrote to General Cushman introducing “Mr. C. H. (Jim) Pulley,” who “enjoys a highly confidential relationship with both former Senator Brewster and Mr. Diggs on the matters they have discussed with you and Vice President Nixon.”
A search of Brewster’s papers turned up empty envelopes bearing the name Pulley—the former senator is said to have sanitized his papers before his death—but research has failed to discover just who Pulley was. According to a former CIA operative, however, he served as a “Washington mob liaison man for Lansky and Trafficante.” If that is true, the date of Pulley’s introduction to Nixon’s aide on Cuban matters takes on significance. It was written days or at most weeks before the CIA began the process that led to contacts with Mafia boss Trafficante about killing Castro.13
Over and above these suggestive clues, however, there exists a far more direct connection. Nixon had long known one of the key men involved in the CIA-Mafia plotting and had even directed him in an earlier secret operation. This was Robert Maheu, former FBI agent turned private investigator, in the employ of both Howard Hughes and—when called upon—the CIA.
Maheu, once described as having the demeanor of W. C. Fields playing a con man, was used as the agency’s go-between with the mafiosi. It was he who made the initial mob contact in the Castro plots, organized and attended meetings over a protracted period, and handed over bundles of cash and poison pills. Maheu had more overall knowledge of the plots than anyone else involved. He also shared information about these activities with Howard Hughes, who thought the CIA-Mafia scheme “a pretty good idea.”
Maheu had multiple connections to Nixon. The full name of his firm, which covered public relations and management consultancy as well as investigations, was Maheu and King Associates Inc. The King in the partnership referred to Bob King, another former FBI man who had been on intimate terms with both Richard and Pat Nixon since World War II. King was a specialist in counterintelligence, had lobbied for Nixon to play a major role on the National Security Council, served as his senior assistant during the vice presidency—for “protection,” as he put it—and had been a key aide in the 1956 campaign. Nixon on occasion described him as his “alter ego,” a place of pride usually reserved for Bebe Rebozo, to whom King was also close.
Even when he formally left Nixon’s office to join Maheu, King had continued working for Nixon. He was back on the campaign trail with him in 1960 and was therefore both allied with Maheu—and close to Nixon—at the time of the anti-Castro plots.
Maheu’s other link to Nixon had been his undercover work four years earlier, on Hughes’s orders but on Nixon’s behalf, in torpedoing opposition to Nixon’s reselection as Eisenhower’s running mate.* Earlier still, and significantly in terms of the Castro plots, he had undertaken secret work at Nixon’s direction, a successful operation against Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
In July 1954 National Security Council minutes had noted that President Eisenhower had asked “whether it was not possible, with all the power of the United States, to ‘break’ Onassis.” His concern arose from a pending Onassis agreement with the king of Saudi Arabia, one that would have put him in control of almost all Saudi oil shipments. The NSC decided on “all appropriate measures” to wreck the deal.
Maheu and a colleague, John Gerrity, found themselves summoned to the vice president’s office. “Nixon came in,” Gerrity recalled, and “gave us the whole Mission: Impossible bit. ‘I know you’ll be careful,’ he said, ‘but you have to understand that while this is a national security matter of terrific importance, we can’t acknowledge you in any way if anything should go wrong.’ . . . I could tell that Nixon enjoyed saying it. He loved these kinds of operations.”14
There followed a series of dirty tricks. Working out of a suite in the National Republican Club, a team of Maheu operatives placed phone taps on Onassis’s New York headquarters.15 The shipowner was harried with lawsuits and branded a liar, cheat, and traitor in stories planted in the world’s press. After a trip by Maheu to Jidda to persuade the king that one of his high officials had been bribed in the deal, the Saudis tore up the Onassis contract.16
In 1992 Maheu adde
d a chilling postscript to the episode. After briefing him, he recalled, Nixon had made a final remark about Onassis. “If it turns out we have to kill the bastard,” he said in hushed tones, “just don’t do it on American soil.” In retrospect, Maheu suggested that Nixon may have said this merely as “something to say, something that sounded tough. . . .”
As for the Castro plots, Maheu asserted that he “had no reason to believe” Nixon knew about them; his partner, Bob King, “drew a blank” altogether when interviewed for this book. Both men, however, spoke in the knowledge that two of the mobsters involved in the scheme died violently while it was being investigated. The body of one of them was found dismembered, floating in an oil drum.17 “I’m one of the last people left who knows what really went on during the operation to assassinate Fidel Castro,” Maheu has explained. “I’m not sure how I want to go, but I am certain I want my body to be in one piece when I do.”
In the magazine interview in which he declared himself “amazed” to learn about the assassination plots, Nixon also declared himself astonished by “all this stuff about the poison shtick.”18 Yet to believe Nixon’s claim to have known nothing about assassination plans in 1960 requires our accepting too long a string of improbabilities—that he was not informed of any of the Castro plots by any of those involved with whom he or his aide General Cushman had some form of contact: Allen Dulles, William Pawley, Howard Hunt, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Mario Kohly and his accomplices, the handlers of Marita Lorenz and June Cobb, and, above all, Bob King and Robert Maheu.19