I got the C-4 from someone I knew in Alpha 66. Back then, it was fairly available, in the right channels. I bought a pound for $2,000. But I wanted to make sure the C-4 was good and would serve our purpose. We needed to test it.
I was still on probation, so I had to be careful. I couldn’t be caught with it. So I asked an explosives expert I knew if he would test it for me. He said yes.
A few days later, the FBI came to see me at my house.
“We hear you have some C-4,” one of the special agents said.
Naturally, I denied it.
“Look,” the FBI agent said, “we’re not here to give you a hard time. We give you our word that we won’t cause any problems for you. We’re not here to arrest you. We just want the C-4.”
I knew they didn’t have any hard evidence, and I wasn’t going to give it to them.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We can be nice,” the agent said. “Or we can be nasty. If you want, we get a warrant. We get the C-4. We get you on a probation violation. And you go back to prison. You like that way better?”
We were on the front porch. The C-4 was hidden inside, maybe forty feet from where we were standing. Still, I was pretty sure that in the time it took them to get a warrant, it could be long gone.
The agent named my explosives expert. He said they had already got some of the C-4 from him. They just wanted the rest.
I knew he was lying. I hadn’t given the explosives guy the C-4 yet.
I was right about being able to get rid of the C-4 before they could get a warrant. I was wrong about the explosives guy, though.
I thought he had been the one who told the FBI. It was his wife. Not because she liked Castro. She just didn’t want her husband to get in any kind of trouble. When she heard what he was getting involved in, she went to the FBI. She thought, correctly, that they would come after me and wouldn’t bother with her husband.
In any case, it became pretty clear that there was no way the plan would work. In all state visits, the intelligence services from both countries work together to avoid security issues. Once the FBI agents came to see me, I knew they would send word to the Secret Service, which would send word to Cuban G2. Once the Cubans heard I was planning something, they would either delay Castro’s arrival, or postpone the trip entirely.
The day after the FBI came to talk with me, I noticed a black sedan with two guys in it sitting outside of my house. They wanted me to see them. They made it obvious. They followed me and let me see them doing it. It was a message.
Our best chance to kill Castro in years was slipping away.
I was still thinking about that when my daughter Ana called. She was excited. The Miami News was sending her to New York to cover Fidel’s visit.
“I’ll be just a few feet away from him when he arrives,” she said.
“When he lands at the airport?”
“Right after,” she said. “At the Cuban Mission.”
I HAD PLAYED out the assassination plot in my mind over and over again. I had seen the C-4 thrown. I had seen it exploding. I had seen Castro dead. Now I saw something else, too.
There’s a chance Ana would have been there when the bomb was thrown. There was a chance she would have been within the blast zone. There was a chance that, in my blind obsession to kill Fidel Castro, I would have killed my own daughter.
I thought of something my wife, Sira, always said to me: “Don’t keep testing your guardian angel.”
She was very religious. She believed strongly in that kind of thing.
I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t matter. Whether it was luck or my guardian angel, my daughter had been spared. That made me think about how much I had risked trying to kill Castro. Not just this time—in Chile, in Puerto Rico, in Cuba. How many times had I put my family in danger? And how many others?
It wasn’t worth it. I decided then, I would try no more.
My secret life was over.
EPILOGUE
MORE THAN THIRTY-FIVE years have passed since Fidel made that visit to the United Nations. As I finish this book, I am eighty-eight years old. I have great-grandchildren. And I have eighty-eight years of questions, and of regrets.
I regret that I waited until now to tell the full story. I regret that I waited until more than fifty years after President Kennedy’s assassination to tell the world the explosive information that I had about the case. Namely, that my CIA case officer, the man whom I knew as Maurice Bishop, was actually David Atlee Phillips, a rising figure in the agency. And I saw Phillips conferring with Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dallas office building not long before the killing of JFK.
I KNEW WHO “Bishop” really was the instant I saw David Phillips’s photograph.
Why didn’t I say so then?
I was afraid.
I believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And I believe that even if David Atlee Phillips wasn’t part of it, he knew about it. He had to. Why else would he have met with Oswald in Dallas, less than three months before the assassination? And why else would he have asked me to help him connect Oswald with the Cuban Embassy in Mexico? Immediately after the president’s murder, the CIA began trying to tie the accused assassin to the Castro regime—a bogus story that the agency still tries to peddle to journalists and authors.
I knew, too, that men who would conspire to kill the president of the United States would think nothing of killing me. So, yes, I was afraid. Even more than that, I was afraid for my family.
At the time, I frequently drove around Miami with my family in the car with me. Even if someone’s intention was only to hurt me, they could miss. They had already tried to shoot me once, when I was alone. If Sira had been sitting next to me, the bullet that cut across my stomach could have hit her. She might not have been as lucky as I was.
A bomb would be worse. As I well knew, a bomb is indiscriminate. Fe del Valle Ramos died because of the incendiary bomb in El Encanto in Havana. That was never my intention. But the bomb only did what a bomb does. It has no brain. It has no heart. It has no conscience. If someone planted a bomb in my car, my children might have been with me when it went off.
So I kept quiet. I only said enough to let Phillips know that I remembered him introducing me to Oswald in the lobby of the Dallas office building. And Gaeton Fonzi was right. I hoped that it would prove two things—that I knew something very important about Phillips, and that I was still loyal enough to keep quiet about it. What more proof could Phillips ask for? I had lied about it under oath to a congressional committee. If Phillips, or the CIA, wanted to continue going after Castro, they had to know they could still count on me.
After that encounter at the luncheon for retired spies, I never heard from Phillips, or from any of his colleagues, again.
And once I had testified under oath, I had even more reason to keep quiet. So the secret stayed with me.
There were many times I wanted to tell the true story. Like anyone who has ever kept a secret knows, it’s a burden. A secret weighs on the heart and on the soul. A secret clatters like a prisoner’s ball and chain, a shackle waiting to be discovered.
Many times I found it on the tip of my tongue, trying to come out. Yet even after the fear began to fade, the time never seemed right.
But, in the end, I chose the right occasion.
In 2014—the fiftieth anniversary of the Warren Report, the official version of the Kennedy assassination that came under fire as a whitewash soon after it was released—I was invited to speak at the Assassination Archives and Research Center conference in Bethesda, Maryland. The weight of the secret had finally outweighed my fear. My children were grown and on their own. Phillips had been dead for more than twenty-five years.
I probably could have gone public when he died, in 1988. The danger, or most of it, I think, died with him. He was the only person I could have identified. The others involved in the assassination—because there had to be others—had nothing to fear from me. I was no threat to them
. And, since I have no idea who they were, I have no idea how many are dead, too. Maybe all of them.
But to tell it when Phillips died might have seemed like I was dancing on his grave. Or that I was trying to get revenge. I wasn’t. So I didn’t.
Then time passed again, and there never seemed to be a moment that was quite right.
Until the conference. It was a forum dedicated to uncovering the truth about the Kennedy assassination.
And Gaeton’s widow, Marie Fonzi, was scheduled to appear there. With her as my witness, I felt I could finally make public the secret that had been burning inside of me for all those years. I felt, honestly, that with her there in that crowded room, I was honoring her husband, Gaeton, my friend.
He had known all along. But now, with her there listening as I stated publicly what he had so cleverly deduced, I felt that he would hear, too. I had told Marie the November before, in a letter. But this was different. This was me telling everyone that Gaeton had been right. I had denied him that confirmation in life. In this forum, in front of a room full of people, it wasn’t just me telling what I knew. I was telling everyone that he knew, too.
It felt good.
And yet, even after this moment of truth telling, I still have one regret that I know I will never be free of.
I’ve always felt great remorse that I gave preference to political matters over my family. I devoted myself to a cause, to Cuba. That is my nature. But that meant I dedicated much less time to my family than I should have. My wife, who died fourteen years ago, had to be both mother and father. Thanks to her, my children were able to get ahead in life. They were able to study, and to succeed, because she did what a mother should, and she did what I should have been there to do.
Do I regret fighting Fidel? No.
Fidel was a dictator. Whether he was a Communist or not, he was a dictator. And a dictator, someone who represses the people—their freedom of thought, their freedom of expression, their freedom of movement—is repulsive to me. It’s in my nature. And Castro, from the very first, showed signs that he was a dictator.
I had my doubts in the beginning. I wanted to give him a chance. Remember, what Cuba had been through before him, under Batista, was so bad, I believed that Castro had to be better. At least, I wanted to believe that.
But I knew a little bit about the history of Mexico, and Castro reminded me of the Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, a man who, in the name of revolution, became a dictator. I thought Castro was the Porfirio Díaz of Cuba.
Then he proved that he was.
His government has always imposed itself on the people through force. It used fear and intimidation to turn Cuba into a prison, with government guards and a system of trustees to keep the population in line.
There are those—mostly people who have never lived in Cuba—who defend Castro. They want me to admit that the Revolution did some good, too.
I admit it. Even when a country’s leaders are perverse or evil, there’s always something that they might do well. Fidel made it possible for many people who hadn’t been able to study to get university educations. The regime provided education to all, and practically eliminated illiteracy. It did much the same with health care on the island, extending benefits to everyone.
Those are things that need to be recognized and accepted. He did it.
But at what cost?
Is the prisoner happier because he has free health care? Or would he rather be free?
I believe in freedom. That is why I fought for a free Cuba.
I don’t regret that. I was very hurt by what was happening in my country, so I did what I thought had to be done. And I think I was correct in what I did. But I believe that I abandoned my family for a political mission. I stole those years from them. Politics consumed me and, in the process, consumed them.
And that I will forever regret.
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