Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  By the summer of 1963, the whirl of intrigue in the anti-Castro underground was reaching a fever pitch. Confusion reigned as the Kennedys tried to impose control over the action-oriented Cuban exile groups like the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE) and Alpha 66, turning off and then on their raids against Cuba as it suited administration policy. The CIA claimed these anti-Castro groups were out of its control, but the rebels were heavily dependent on agency funding and it was never certain whether the groups’ frequent defiance of Kennedy policy was in fact instigated by their spymasters in Langley and Miami.

  The DRE was a particular favorite of the CIA. Founded in 1954 as a Catholic student group militantly opposed to the dictator Batista, it later shifted its underground operations against Castro, moving its headquarters to Miami in 1960. The group’s most notorious exploit—a nighttime August 1962 raid when two of its speedboats opened fire on a beachfront Havana hotel in an assassination attempt on Castro—was explained away by the State Department as an act of freelance buccaneering that was executed without the government’s knowledge or support. But, in fact, the daring raid had been carefully plotted at the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami.

  These were strange days marked by the emergence of mysterious characters. In August 1963, the DRE became entangled with a puzzling young man named Lee Harvey Oswald. He presented himself to the group’s New Orleans chapter as a sympathizer with the anti-Castro cause, but then created a spectacle by handing out pro-Castro leaflets and scuffling with DRE members in the street. Was the mysterious ex-Marine, who had defected to the Soviet Union and had then returned to the United States with surprising ease, a left-wing adventurer of some sort—or was he playing out some clandestine role with the CIA-backed DRE? Once again, the truth was murky.

  The DRE was not the only Cuban exile group that crossed paths with Oswald that summer. According to Bay of Pigs veteran Angelo Murgado, he and a team of fellow Cuban exiles not only observed Oswald’s suspicious activities in New Orleans in August 1963, they reported on him to Bobby Kennedy.

  Murgado was aligned with the Cuban exile faction led by Manuel Artime, the Brigade’s political leader. Like Murgado, Artime had fought briefly alongside Castro, but as a devout Jesuit-trained medical student, he had quickly grown alienated from Fidel’s communistic initiatives, and he fled the island with the CIA’s assistance. Artime was an artful operator. A conservative Catholic, he established himself as the CIA’s “golden boy,” building a close friendship with the reactionary agent Howard Hunt. But he uttered enough liberal pieties to also win the Kennedys’ support, telling one fellow Brigade leader that “the only way we could control the Communists in Cuba was with love” and lecturing U.S. officials that the government that replaced Castro must embrace social reforms to avoid sliding backwards to the medieval cruelty of the Batista era. Artime enjoyed access to Bobby Kennedy, meeting with him in his Washington office, at Hickory Hill, and at the family’s Palm Beach mansion. A secret Defense Department background sheet on the Brigade leader described him as “intelligent, aggressive, energetic, hotheaded and dogmatic”—a profile that also neatly fit the young attorney general. But RFK never fully trusted Artime, as he did Harry Ruiz Williams. He was too close to the CIA. And, in the end, Artime was all about Artime.

  According to Murgado, he participated with Artime’s group in CIA-backed raids on Cuba, contaminating sugar cane fields and livestock with toxins. Some Brigade veterans enlisted in the U.S. military, but Murgado chose to join the CIA’s covert war on Havana. Trained in intelligence-gathering methods, he began to detect suspicious activity among some of his fellow exiles in the Miami Cuban community, a dangerous level of chatter aimed at President Kennedy. He took his concerns to Artime, who was initially reluctant to do anything about them for fear of betraying Cuban comrades. But, said Murgado, Artime finally agreed to set up a meeting with Bobby Kennedy where they could alert him to the threats against his brother.

  Today, Angelo Murgado is a graying, stocky man in his mid-sixties with a voluble, colorful personality. The story he recounted was spiced with earthy vernacular and the rich tang of his Cuban accent. He spoke freely about his interactions with Bobby Kennedy, but abruptly closed the door on questions relating to fellow Cuban exiles and the assassination of JFK.

  Murgado said that he and Artime first met with Bobby at the Kennedys’ Mediterranean-style, red tile–roofed mansion on North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach. The only other person who attended this meeting was another Bay of Pigs veteran affiliated with Artime named Manuel Reboso. (Artime died of cancer in 1977 and Reboso reportedly left the United States and could not be located.) At their first meeting, Murgado said he was stunned to see the Rex, the flagship of the CIA’s secret war on Cuba, anchored in the Atlantic waters outside the Kennedys’ home. “We used to load speedboats on the Rex, get within three miles of Cuba and then put the speedboats with raiders in the water,” Murgado told me. “I asked Manolo [Artime], ‘What the hell is the Rex doing outside Bobby’s home?’” To the exiles it was one more indication of how closely RFK was trying to hold the Cuba operation.

  At the meeting, Murgado told the attorney general of his alarm about the growing anti-Kennedy passions in Cuban exile circles. “I told him that we have to keep a sharp look on these Cubans. I was afraid that one of our guys would go crazy. And he said, ‘You mean to tell me that some heat could come from the [anti-Castro] Cubans? And I said, ‘Yes. The same way that a lot of people are trying to hit Castro, there are a lot of people trying to hit the president of the United States…. We have a lot of crazy sons of bitches and they’re willing to pull anything.’”

  Artime tried to downplay the threat, according to Murgado, but Bobby fixed on it with a scorching intensity. “He was a fanatic kamikaze about covering his brother’s ass. You could tell that was the main thing that drove him. Nothing would be able to get to the president if Bobby was standing in the middle. I wish I could have a brother who felt 20 percent of what Bobby felt about his brother. I would be the happiest cat in the world. That’s why I loved him so much. Even today, even right now, talking to you about him, I get very emotional. Cubans are fucking highly emotional. We’re talking about someone with a heck of a lot of conviction, and a heck of a pedigree.”

  Murgado said that Bobby asked him to keep an eye on alarming Cuban exile activity and report back to him. “We asked, ‘Why don’t you tell the president and use the CIA or FBI?’ And he said, no, no, no—he didn’t trust any of the agencies. And he didn’t want to load his brother down with this situation. So we went outside the CIA and we did this on a personal basis with Bobby.” The attorney general paid Murgado’s expenses out of his own pocket, according to the Bay of Pigs veteran. “He would ask us, ‘What did you guys spend?’ And we’d say, ‘$86.05.’” Murgado could not produce any proof of these payments. But setting up private intelligence operations that he tightly controlled was a well-established practice of Bobby Kennedy’s throughout his political career.

  In the summer of 1963, Murgado’s surveillance work led him to New Orleans, where he came across a curious gringo named Lee Harvey Oswald. Murgado and his compadres watched Oswald one day as he distributed his pro-Castro propaganda on the street. They later saw stacks of Oswald’s pamphlets in the office of Carlos Bringuier, one of the local DRE delegates who had confronted Oswald in a raucous shouting match that New Orleans police would report appeared staged. (Bringuier was a vehemently anti-Kennedy exile leader who had vowed to defy the administration’s crackdown on his group’s Cuba raids.)

  Murgado’s team came to the conclusion that Oswald was an FBI informant. “He was a peon in a game run by what I call ‘the invisible government.’” To shed light on Oswald’s murky game, Murgado said they went so far as to contemplate eliminating him to see who would take his place in the clandestine operation. But they were warned by the FBI to leave town. “We were about to sanitize Oswald—you know, kill the motherfucker!—and the FBI stopped us.”

  After returning to
Florida, Murgado met with Bobby again at his Palm Beach house, where he reported on his surveillance targets, including the mysterious Oswald. He showed Kennedy newspaper photos taken of Oswald handing out his pro-Castro pamphlets. He told the attorney general that as far as he could determine Oswald was tied to the FBI. Bobby had never heard of Oswald, according to Murgado, but he did not seem concerned about him because of his apparent government role and the conversation quickly moved on to other matters. Murgado would not think seriously about Oswald again until November 22.

  Murgado is indisputably a colorful character. He said that he changed his name to Angelo Kennedy in the 1960s in memory of the fallen president he had served. He admitted that, after JFK’s assassination, he and the rest of Manuel Artime’s band became so cynical about the U.S. government that they continued to accept CIA subsidies to overthrow Castro while running contraband liquor, tobacco, and guns out of Nicaragua. (Despite reports to the contrary, he insisted they did not traffic in drugs.) After his career as a self-described “mercenary” came to an end, Murgado worked as a Miami building code inspector. In 1999 he was arrested for pocketing cash in return for zoning favors, later pleading guilty to the bribery charges. (He struck a deal with prosecutors that kept him out of jail.)

  All this made Murgado a controversial figure in assassination circles when he suddenly popped into the spotlight in 2005 before just as quickly disappearing back into the shadows. But the anti-Castro underworld was never the exclusive domain of shining knights. It had more than its share of tarnished heroes and intrepid rogues, as does any exile community in the shadow of American empire that runs on broken dreams and ruthless ambitions. Despite his checkered past, Murgado’s story about Oswald and RFK has not been refuted.

  If Murgado’s story is to be believed, it has historical significance. Assassination researchers have long speculated about whether Bobby Kennedy was already familiar with the name Oswald when it suddenly exploded on the American stage on the afternoon of November 22. Was this the man to whom Bobby was referring when he told anti-Castro leader Harry Ruiz Williams that afternoon, “One of your guys did it”? Did RFK immediately associate Oswald with the covert war against Castro because of Murgado’s intelligence report? Or did he brush quickly past Oswald when Murgado brought him up because, as some researchers have suggested, he already connected the name to the administration’s secret war? The Murgado story may provide an important key to Bobby’s understanding of the crime. It could help explain why the president’s brother cast his suspicions immediately towards the anti-Castro underworld on the afternoon of November 22.

  AS THE DAYS DWINDLED down to November, the Kennedys struggled to control the sprawling operations related to Cuba. Some of these activities were sanctioned by the administration, some were not. Sometimes one arm of government subverted official government policy. Sometimes the Kennedys themselves seemed to contradict their own policy, ordering contingency plans for another Cuba invasion while opening a secret back channel to Castro to explore peace. And all the while, the CIA pursued its own agenda, with an unsavory cast of accomplices that included mobsters and the type of hotheaded exiles that gave Murgado nightmares. It was Bobby’s job to stay on top of this sulfurous miasma—a task that took on a frantic urgency as the threats against his brother multiplied. Murgado shook his head in wonder at the daunting burdens that seemed piled on Bobby’s shoulders. “He seemed to have twenty irons in the fire at any one time. I don’t know how a human being has the capability to fight on all those fronts at the same time. It was beyond my comprehension.”

  In April 1963, two years after the Bay of Pigs, Cuban exiles’ seething frustration with the Kennedy administration burst into public view when José Miró Cardona, a distinguished Havana law professor who had briefly served as Castro’s first premier, angrily resigned as president of the Miami-based Cuban Revolutionary Council, the loose coalition that tied together anti-Castro rebel groups. Miró charged that the administration’s crackdown on Cuba raiding expeditions following the missile crisis proved that JFK had cut a deal with Khrushchev to “coexist” with Castro. The Kennedys had sold out the liberation movement, he dramatically declared: “The struggle for Cuba is in the process of being liquidated by the [U.S.] government.”

  On April 5, days before issuing his heated denunciation of Kennedy policy, Miró had visited the attorney general in his office, where he found him surrounded by his rampant children and slobbering dog. The proud sixty-year-old jurist told RFK that his honor was at stake—he had stood with the Kennedys because the president had promised him the previous year that the United States would launch a military invasion of Cuba, but his brother had reneged on his pledge. In the history of Cuba, no man had ever been more “insulted” than he, Miró told Bobby. With his high forehead, oversized spectacles and graying mustache, Miró exuded a grave, professorial intensity. He spent four hours in the attorney general’s office, sternly presenting his case. But Kennedy was unmoved. He told Miró that the exile groups could not continue launching raids on Cuba “right under our nose and without any control.” To make matters worse, said the attorney general, the groups brayed loudly about their exploits at press conferences. As for a military invasion of the island, Bobby continued, Miro could forget it: “Doctor, we have told you from the very beginning that there is not going to be any invasion or military action.”

  Two days later, an outraged Miró reported back to his CIA contact about his meeting with Kennedy. After leaving the Justice Department, the exile leader told the CIA official, he vented so bitterly to a Kennedy aide that he doubted “the president and attorney general would ever forgive what [I] said.” The administration tried to muzzle Miró before he could fire his anti-Kennedy blast in public. Before leaving Washington, the exile leader received a call from a White House aide who “threatened that [he] would be labeled a traitor,” according to a report by the CIA, which closely monitored the political storm. But Miró proudly retorted that “he could never be a traitor to the United States because he was not a citizen of the United States and that his first and only loyalty was to Cuba.”

  Miró’s public break with the administration opened the floodgates of anti-Kennedy fury in the Cuban exile world. Desmond FitzGerald, the CIA official who had replaced Bill Harvey as the agency’s chief Cuba man, reported to Director McCone on April 11 that “there appears to be a movement within the Cuban Brigade to organize a formal request for the return of the Brigade flag, which was presented to President Kennedy at the Orange Bowl ceremony.” This would have been a stinging political embarrassment for the administration, coming at a time when Republican critics like Richard Nixon were chiding the White House for its flip-flopping Cuba policy. Under President Kennedy, sniped Nixon that month, we had “pledged the Cuban exiles that their flag would fly in Havana, then pledged ourselves not to invade.” The once and future Republican standard bearer announced that it was time “to do whatever is necessary to force the removal of the Soviet beachhead in Cuba.”

  Bobby Kennedy maneuvered on multiple fronts to defuse the Cuban political bombshell. He worked feverishly to make sure that Brigade veterans, whom he called the “cream of Cuba,” were taken care of, pulling strings to find them jobs and legal help and even moving two exile leaders into his neighborhood, renting houses for them down the road from Hickory Hill. He smoothed the way for more than two hundred brigadistas to join the U.S. Army, where they underwent training at Fort Benning, Georgia for what they hoped would be a more successful assault on Cuba. He explored the possibility of creating a special Peace Corps unit for Cuban exiles and investigated how the government could channel others into law enforcement careers. Brigade family members thought of Bobby as their social worker. In June several exile wives wrote him to seek his help in getting their welfare payments continued.

  JFK was cool and calculating in his handling of Cuba policy, greenlighting raids on the island when he wanted to send Moscow a warning signal and shutting them down when he wished to i
mprove Soviet relations. He tended to regard Cuba as a sideshow, a pawn in the great superpower chess game. But Bobby took the Cuban exiles’ passionate cause more to heart, developing particularly strong sympathies for the Brigade veterans. Always attracted to men whose courage had been tested in battle, RFK embraced Brigade heroes like Artime, Oliva, and Williams. He appalled snobbish CIA officials like FitzGerald, who viewed the Cuban exiles with contempt, by entertaining them at his home and inviting them on family skiing trips. “Yes, I do think he felt a sense of guilt or obligation to them,” said John Nolan, Bobby’s point man on Cuba. “It was not just for political reasons, though he was clearly not ignorant of that. I think he felt indebted to them. He made himself available to the Brigade leaders any place, any time, day or night.”

  While Bobby’s sympathies were genuine, he was constantly on alert for how the Brigade’s political disgruntlement could hurt his brother. In July, the attorney general’s office was informed of a disturbing development in Brigade circles. According to a confidential State Department memo sent to Kennedy’s office on July 19, 1963, two militant, far-right Bay of Pigs veterans identified only by their last names, “Llaca” and “Andreo,” were plotting a bold gambit to compel the Kennedy administration to intervene in Cuba. (These were likely Enrique Orbiz Llaca and Jose Santos Andreu.) The two men were attempting to “organize an exile raid with the objective of seizing a town in Cuba, preferably one with a weak security set-up but a strong radio station, and start broadcasting appeals for U.S. Marines to come to the rescue.” If the Kennedy administration did not respond by sending in military forces, the rebellion would be crushed, creating a political nightmare for the White House along the lines of Moscow’s bloody repression of the 1956 Hungary uprising. This, the memo pointed out, seemed to be the real goal of the plotters. After the freedom fighters were martyred by Castro’s forces, “Kennedy, having stood by doing nothing, would be open to the charge that he abandoned the rebels when he had a perfect pretext to act. Results: JFK would enter the lists in ’64 a branded coward and traitor to his word.”