By 1963, Cuba was Walker’s favorite rabble-rousing topic, another reason to vilify President Kennedy. He and others on the extreme right blamed the President personally for the fact that Fidel Castro was still in power, still ruling a Communist enclave off the coast of the United States. In the months before the assassination, General Walker would be at meetings of Cuban exiles, in the words of one witness, “trying to arouse the feelings of the Cuban refugees in Dallas against the Kennedy administration.” It was one of the General’s aides, Robert Surrey, who was to produce the “Wanted for Treason” leaflet distributed in Dallas before Kennedy’s visit that November.
The jingoism typified by General Walker found a significant following, and the President himself took the outcry seriously. When he learned that a film was to be made based on the book Seven Days in May—a fictional account of a plot by right-wing generals to overthrow an American president because of his “appeasement of the Communists”—Kennedy offered the White House as a shooting location.
Cuba and the U.S. posture toward Cuba is key to the disentangling of the Kennedy assassination story. Cuba, and the continuing questions about the shadowy activity of U.S. intelligence.
George de Mohrenschildt apparently left Dallas nine days after the attempt on General Walker’s life, to spend the months that followed involved in oil exploration on the Caribbean island of Haiti. A change of address postcard from Oswald aside, the improbable relationship had ended as abruptly as it had begun. George de Mohrenschildt’s name, however, would crop up in CIA and U.S. Army Intelligence files in the months that followed. One former CIA official, Nicholas Anikeeff, acknowledged that he had known de Mohrenschildt for years and “believed” he saw him in the spring of 1963. “I talked with de Mohrenschildt,” he said, “and may have spoken with him about Oswald.” Anikeeff was reportedly a branch chief in the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division in the early 1960s.
A CIA document written years later, meanwhile, refers obliquely to correspondence between Anikeeff and de Mohrenschildt. It was filed by Raymond Rocca, deputy to CIA Counterintelligence chief James Angleton. As analysis of available information shows, Angleton’s department monitored Oswald’s progress from the time of his defection until the assassination. He was perhaps seen as potentially useful, perhaps to be manipulated in some way—as the developing story will suggest.
Lee Oswald was to spend the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, a time frame and a city that are central to the Assassinations Committee’s thesis that anti-Castro exiles and elements of the Mafia may have been involved in the Kennedy assassination. From that point on, in public, Oswald would become known for leftist posturing in support of Fidel Castro. Other information, though, suggests that he also had links to anti-Castro activity.
Who was playing what game? For in a scenario where much is obscure, there certainly was a game. The backdrop was Cuba.
III
CONSPIRACIES
Cuba and the Mob
Chapter 13
The Company
and the Crooks
“Anti-Castro activists and organizations … acquired the means, motive and opportunity to assassinate the President.”
—Staff report to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1979
Cuba was President Kennedy’s albatross, but it had hung in the rigging of the American ship of state for decades. Washington had perceived it as just another poverty-stricken island in the sun, an American puppet that would hopefully stay that way. So it had, mostly under the rule of a former Army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista, an old-fashioned dictator whose priority was to line his own pockets. He was able to do so above all because of the patronage of American organized-crime bosses, who turned Havana into a mecca for gambling and prostitution. That was fine for everyone but the vast majority of the Cuban people, who remained miserably poor.
On New Year’s Day, 1959, Cuba had rallied to the liberation call of a rebel named Fidel Castro, and Batista fled. In Washington, DC, as in America’s citadels of organized crime, the government of President Eisenhower watched and waited to see what sort of revolution Castro wrought. Few in the outside world suspected its true Marxist colors, but the Central Intelligence Agency had for years watched Castro with foreboding. Within months of his coming to power, it was clear that Cuba was to be a Communist state, raising the specter of a Soviet outpost on America’s doorstep. The United States reacted with instinctive outrage, nowhere more strongly than at the CIA and in the Eisenhower White House.
The Agency began encouraging the activities of the many thousands of anti-Castro exiles who had flooded into the United States, mostly to Florida and the South. Under the direction of a CIA officer named Howard Hunt, later to become notorious for his role in Watergate, the refugee leaders formed a united front organization—which eventually became the Cuban Revolutionary Council. With the assistance of the CIA, known to insiders as “The Company,” young Cubans were recruited for armed struggle against Castro. At camps in Florida and Panama, and later in Guatemala and Nicaragua, U.S. Army officers trained the exiles for an invasion of their homeland. Hunt had a recommendation. “Assassinate Castro,” he proposed, “before or coincident with the invasion (a task for Cuban patriots). Discard any thought of a popular uprising against Castro until the issue has already been militarily decided.”
In the White House, Richard Nixon was Vice President. With President Eisenhower in poor health and seeing out the last days of his administration, Nixon had a more active role than most deputy leaders. He was close to many of the wealthy Americans and Cubans who had most interest in the fall of Castro, and was by his own account the “strongest and most persistent advocate” of efforts to bring it about. Nixon willingly became the White House action man on the Cuban project, reportedly favoring the extreme rightists among the Cuban exiles.
On one of the tapes that were to destroy his presidency, Nixon brooded about what could come out given the involvement of several Cuban exiles in Watergate: “You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further… .” And, later the same day: “If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuban thing, it would be a fiasco.”
In November 1960, at the height of preparations for an exile invasion, John F. Kennedy was elected President. The plans he inherited from the CIA and the previous administration led him into a situation worse than fiasco. Kennedy loyalists and their opponents would long argue about where fault lay for what occurred on April 17, 1961, when a force of Cuban exiles was put ashore at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s south coast. Sifting through the multiple accounts, it seems that the new President had been inadequately briefed by the CIA and received bad military advice.
The idea was that the exiles would establish a beachhead, then capture and hold an area that could be claimed as the territory of the provisional government. Against all the evidence, it was blithely hoped a general uprising against Castro would follow, leading to Castro’s fall from power. In fact, the motley band of fifteen hundred Cuban exiles went ashore into terrain bristling with well-prepared Castro defenders. They floundered in treacherous salt marshes, ran out of ammunition when Castro’s airplanes sunk their supply ships, and were ignominiously routed. Many were killed and more than a thousand rounded up and marched off to prison.
In public, President Kennedy accepted full responsibility, but the Bay of Pigs fiasco became the cause of lasting acrimony. In the CIA and in some military circles, the President was accused of vacillation. He had refused permission for air strikes and intervention by U.S. armed forces, on the grounds that such action was politically indefensible. The CIA’s Howard Hunt told the author how, as news of the debacle came in, he and colleagues reacted with dismay and scorn: “At CIA headquarters, in our war room … we thought, as the indications came in, that the administration would feel more and more an obligation to unleash some United States power to equaliz
e the situation. We kept receiving the administration’s refusals with incredulity. I felt a sense of hollowness … somewhere along the way we lost a good part of our national will to prevail. I think it was a failure of nerve.”
Hunt’s comments suggest the Agency knew in advance that the operation could not succeed without U.S. military support, that it had banked on being able to pressure the President into direct intervention. Worst of all, perhaps, CIA Director Dulles had encouraged the President to believe the landing would be followed by a mass popular uprising—a prospect that CIA intelligence reports indicated was wholly improbable.
There were also indications that the CIA had become a law unto itself. Contrary to the President’s express orders, CIA officers had landed on the beach with the exiles. Agents had earlier told their Cuban protégés to press ahead with the invasion even were the President to call off the landing at the last moment. This, Robert Kennedy later commented, was “virtually treason.” His elder brother said privately that he would like “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
The President did not do quite that, but the ensuing shake-up led to the resignation of Director Dulles and of Deputy Director Richard Bissell, who had been responsible for the Bay of Pigs planning. Dulles, in a great irony, was eventually to serve on the Warren Commission probe of the President’s assassination—a Commission that would gloss over the failings of American intelligence agencies. In the lower ranks of the CIA, the President had stirred lasting anger and resentment. For some officers, involvement with the Cuban exile movement had become a passionate commitment.
The President’s brother Robert took over the responsibility of overseeing Cuban matters. Hunt, who thought him “an abrasive little man,” recalled especially a significant clash between the younger Kennedy and William Harvey, a swashbuckling senior agent who played a leading role after the Bay of Pigs. In a less-than-subtle reference to the Bay of Pigs disaster, Harvey liked to display behind his desk a lurid poster that read “The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots.” Robert Kennedy found it and its owner objectionable, and Harvey was eventually moved sideways.
If the Kennedys had alienated many at the CIA, they roused even stronger passions among the hot-blooded Hispanic exiles. “The failure of the Bay of Pigs had a disastrous effect,” Hunt said. “They were outraged that a country so powerful as the United States, only ninety miles away from their homeland, could have permitted a disaster such as the Bay of Pigs to have taken place… . The more knowledgeable, the more sophisticated people in the Cuban community, did blame the President personally.”
For many, the catchword for the Bay of Pigs became the “Betrayal.” The Cuban who had led the exiles onto the beaches, Pepe San Román, recalled that he afterward “hated the United States… . Every day it became worse, and then I was getting madder and madder and I wanted to get a rifle and come and fight against the U.S… . For me, the government of the United States [had been] the utmost of everything—bigger than my father, than my mother, than God … it was so low, so low a blow to us with so many plans and so many hopes … they knew before they sent us, in my mind, that they were not going to go ahead with it.”
San Román’s comments were too gentle for some extremists, who placed the blame firmly on the American leadership. Mario Kohly Jr. quoted his late father, who claimed the Cuban presidency in exile, as saying, “John Kennedy sold out the American people. John Kennedy was a traitor … he was a Communist.” The President had made enemies early in his tenure, and the ambiguity of his Cuba policy over the two years that followed increased the animosity.
The Bay of Pigs had stiffened the President’s determination to resolve the Cuban problem aggressively. He went along with the precept that “there can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor,” and pressed on with plans to get rid of him. The CIA, theoretically now more tightly controlled by the President’s brother, set up an extraordinary new center of operations. Code-named “JM/WAVE,” and situated in Miami, it was in effect the headquarters for a very public “secret war” against Cuba. This, the Agency’s most ambitious project ever, came to involve seven hundred CIA personnel and co-opted Army officers recruiting, training, and supplying thousands of Cuban exiles.
The aim this time was to wage a war of attrition, to harass Castro with hit-and-run raids against industrial and military targets, and incite guerrilla warfare by anti-Castro groups operating inside Cuba. Robert Kennedy urged that “no time, money, effort—or manpower—be spared,” and threw himself into the fray with boundless energy.
The nerve center of the new struggle was set up in Miami, where the vast majority of the exiles were concentrated. In woods on the campus of the University of Miami, the CIA established a front operation in the shape of an electronics company named Zenith Technological Services. At the height of its activity, in 1962, the JM/WAVE station controlled as many as six hundred Americans, mostly CIA officers, and up to three thousand contract agents. It spawned front operations—boat shops, detective and travel agencies, and gun stores. There were hundreds of “safe houses”—and accommodations ranging from apartments to opulent townhouses.
Of the quarter of a million Cuban refugees in the United States, many were content to settle into new lives. Others, including numerous brave young men, clutched at the new straw of hope the Americans held out. Night after night, launches slipped out of the Florida waterways on missions of sabotage and propaganda. The exiles built up huge arms caches, many of them concealed in the CIA’s “safe houses.” They trained with CIA facilities and U.S. military instructors. Few, however, appear to have given serious thought to the main flaw in the plans, that Fidel Castro remained a popular leader. The exiles’ operations were to achieve little in the long run, except to confirm Castro’s accusation that the United States was guilty of aggression.
The President and his brother had meanwhile committed themselves to bringing back the hundreds of exiles who had been captured at the Bay of Pigs, and resolved to get the men home by the end of 1962. A ransom was agreed, and the last of the Bay of Pigs captives were back by New Year’s. At a rally in a Miami sports stadium, President Kennedy made a stirring speech of welcome—in which he not only railed against Castro and Communism, but appeared to promise much more. “I can assure you,” Kennedy cried, having been presented with the flag of the force that had gone ashore at the Bay of Pigs, “that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.”
The speech in the Miami stadium was made only weeks after the final conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Through the month of October, the world had trembled as the leaders of the United States and Russia traded threats of war. The immediate cause had been the arrival in Cuba of Soviet missiles capable of bombarding the United States, and the outcome—to Castro’s noisy fury—had been a Soviet agreement to withdraw them. The United States, for its part, had given indirect assurances that there would be no invasion of Cuba by the United States.
It was a commitment, Kennedy knew, that would earn him no honors among his political opponents. The Republicans would say, he reflected, that “we had a chance to get rid of Castro, and instead of doing so ended up by guaranteeing him.” That was certainly what many in the CIA and the Cuban exile community thought. A measure of the gulf between Kennedy and such critics is the fact that some of them claimed the Soviet missiles were not in fact removed from Cuba.
“It has never been established that any missiles were ever removed from the island,” Howard Hunt would still be telling the author in the late 1970s, “Mr. Khrushchev agreed that photo surveillance could be conducted of the departing Soviet ships, but there have been no satellite scanners or aircraft cameras developed yet that can peer inside a wooden crate or through a tarpaulin. [The President] did not insist upon on-site inspection or on boarding the Soviet ships as they departed. Hopefully the missiles were taken out, but nobody dares say that they were.”
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In the view of one Cuban exile the author interviewed, the outcome of the Missile Crisis was “a beautifully planned theatrical hoax.”1 The exile leadership did present a flag to the President at the rally in late December 1962, but—according to Hunt—“the Brigade feeling against Kennedy was so great that the presentation nearly did not take place at all.” The exiles’ distrust of the President, moreover, soon began to seem well founded.
In 1963, Kennedy began to clamp down on unauthorized exile military activity on U.S. territory. Things came to a head in mid-March after one of the most combative anti-Castro groups, Alpha 66, carried out a series of unauthorized attacks on Soviet ships in Cuban ports. Coming just months after the Missile Crisis, the raids were dangerously provocative—intentionally so, as this story will show. To dissociate the United States from the attacks, Kennedy acted firmly. The government announced that same month that it would “take every step necessary to make certain that American soil is not used as a base for refugee raids on Cuban and Soviet shipping.” U.S. authorities matched words with action, seizing an exile vessel in Florida and using administration influence to abort another operation being mounted from the British-administered Bahamas.
The powerful American apparatus that had aided and abetted the exiles now had orders to obstruct them. The U.S. Customs and Immigration authorities, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the FBI, all began frustrating the efforts of Cuban raiders. This clampdown on raids, some have claimed, served to mask other, more secret, plans to have Castro killed and overthrow the Cuban regime. At the time, however, reining in the exiles served to ease the tension with the Soviet Union. For its part, the Soviets began to withdraw thousands of military “advisers” from Cuba, a process that would continue.
The seemingly less aggressive posture on Cuba met with vociferous opposition within the United States. Richard Nixon made speeches urging its reversal, calling for action to force the Communist regime from power—overtly supporting the exiles. The exile militants and some of their CIA mentors, for their part, were enraged by the President’s actions. They felt, as Howard Hunt put it, that U.S. assistance to the exiles was “a fraud, a fraud perpetrated on the Cuban people, and on the American people.”