The orthodox thinking on the episode was for years that CIA officials—overstepping their authority—plotted Castro’s assassination behind the backs of the President and his brother. If the brothers encouraged other assassination plots against Castro, though—as compelling information now suggests—why doubt they were likewise aware of the Cubela plot?5
There is something else. Many long accepted that Cubela may have been the traitor to Castro he appeared to be. A 2012 account of the episode by former senior CIA analyst Brian Latell, however, suggests persuasively that—as initially seemed possible—Cubela was a double agent all along. The “traitor,” according to this thesis, reported every approach by the CIA back to Castro.
The possible implications are obvious, an encouragement to those who theorize that Castro—becoming aware at some point that the United States hoped to have him killed—struck first and had a hand in President Kennedy’s assassination.
The totality of the evidence, though, is too tangled to justify that easy speculation.
With the exception of those privy to the continuing plans to overthrow Castro, Cuban exiles saw out the summer of 1963 filled with gloom and resentment. Passions ran highest among those the administration had discarded as extremists, whose operations were stymied by the Kennedy clampdown on unauthorized military activity.
A host of disparate exile groups had been trained and armed to the teeth, and admonitions from the White House only inflamed their determination to persist. One Bay of Pigs veteran said long afterward, “We used the tactics we learned from the CIA because we were trained by them to do everything.”
The most militant groups, like Alpha 66—the group that incurred the President’s wrath with its attacks on Soviet shipping—had no intention of going out of business. More worryingly, some of the CIA’s protégés appear to have retained the loyalty and moral support of elements within the Agency itself. To such men, Kennedy’s new policies were to be opposed and thwarted.
Over the years, the author talked many times with the founder of Alpha 66, Antonio Veciana, a man whose revelations were to lead to intensive congressional investigation. They appeared to identify an element, either of the CIA or of one of the tentacles of U.S. intelligence, as having been behind exile outrages—a shadowy presence that deliberately sought to sabotage the President’s search for a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union.
When his group attacked Soviet ships in March 1963, Veciana claimed, it was on specific instructions from a man he knew as “Maurice Bishop”—the code name for his American intelligence handler. It was at Bishop’s urging that Veciana and his colleagues bragged about their exploits at a Washington press conference. It was he who continued to press them to flout Kennedy orders and mount fresh actions. “It was my case officer,” Veciana said, “who had the idea to attack the Soviet ships. The intention was to cause trouble between Kennedy and Russia. ‘Bishop’ believed that Kennedy and Khrushchev had made a secret agreement that the U.S.A. would do nothing more to help in the fight against Castro… . He said you had to put Kennedy against the wall in order to force him to make decisions that would remove Castro’s regime.”
Veciana said he worked under the tutelage of “Maurice Bishop” from 1960, when the Cuban had been a leading accountant working in Havana, up to and beyond his flight from Cuba—for a total of nearly thirteen years. He had left Cuba following a botched assassination plot against Castro—the first but not the last that Bishop was to propose. His American patron also promoted armed landing operations and other skullduggery.
Ominously, Veciana asserted, Bishop told him in 1963 that “the best thing for this country was that Kennedy and his advisers should not be running it.” Just months after Bishop uttered those sentiments, according to Veciana, he saw him in the company of Lee Oswald.
It was late August or the first days of September, Veciana recalled, when Bishop summoned him to a meeting in Dallas, Texas—a city where they often had rendezvous. On arrival in Dallas, Veciana was told to meet Bishop at a skyscraper business building in the downtown area. From the details Veciana provided, this has been identified as having been the Southland Center, headquarters of a major insurance group. It had a public area on the first floor. When Veciana arrived, a little ahead of schedule, Bishop was not alone.
In Veciana’s words, “Maurice was accompanied by a young man who gave me the impression of being very quiet, rather strange and preoccupied. The three of us walked to a cafeteria. The young man was with us ten or fifteen minutes, until Maurice told him something like, ‘All right, see you later,’ and dismissed him.” After the assassination, when Lee Oswald’s face was plastered all over the newspapers and television screens, Veciana said, he at once recognized Oswald as the young man he had seen with Bishop in Dallas.
Veciana remained adamant that there was no mistake. An Assassinations Committee staff report noted: “There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that the man was Oswald, not just someone who resembled him.” Veciana pointed out that he had been trained by Bishop and his associates to remember the physical characteristics of people. If it was not Oswald he saw with his handler, he said, it was his “exact double.”
Oswald may indeed have visited Dallas at the date Veciana mentioned. Though he was based at the time in New Orleans, the alleged Bishop meeting occurred during a period for which his movements are sparsely documented. Oswald was unusually invisible between August 21 and September 17, making only one New Orleans appearance that was reported by witnesses. This was on Labor Day, September 2, when he reportedly visited Charles Murret—the uncle with Mafia connections.
Otherwise, Oswald’s documented progress is marked by records of visits to the employment office, the cashing of unemployment checks, and the withdrawal of library books. These are not necessarily valid for charting Oswald’s movements—the FBI could authenticate Oswald’s signature on only a few of the unemployment documents. Of the seventeen firms where Oswald said he applied for work, thirteen denied it and four did not even exist. Even accepting the timetable the record suggests, moreover, there is one uninterrupted gap, between September 6 and 9.
A hint that Oswald may indeed have been out of New Orleans lies in the fact that three library books returned at the end of this period were overdue—a unique lapse in Oswald’s usually meticulous library discipline over the months. On the evidence, there is no problem in accepting that there may have been an Oswald excursion to Dallas—five hundred miles away—within the Veciana time frame.6
“The Committee cannot be conclusive,” Assassinations Committee Chief Counsel Robert Blakey told a public hearing, “but it can say that Veciana’s allegations remain undiscredited.” That careful statement reflected differences of opinion within the Committee about Veciana—differences colored by the possible implications of his claim.7
As detailed on a later page, the Committee found evidence that a person using the name Bishop did exist, and in the ranks of the CIA. This author, moreover, located a witness who had acted as cutout between Veciana and Bishop. The Committee established, too—though the available record is sparse—that the CIA did have contact with Veciana in the early 1960s. U.S. Army Intelligence also had an “operational interest,” because of Veciana’s role with Alpha 66. The CIA denied, however, having assigned a case officer to Veciana—a denial the Committee found hard to accept because he was the dominant figure in a major exile organization.
The Committee investigator who pursued the Veciana lead, Gaeton Fonzi, believed the Cuban’s account of having seen Oswald with Bishop was truthful, that Bishop was indeed a CIA officer—and that he uncovered the real identity of the man behind the pseudonym. The issue will become pertinent as this story unfolds.
In June 1963, in Florida, federal agents enforcing the Kennedy clamp-down seized an aircraft and explosives intended for use in an exile bombing raid against the Shell Oil refinery in Cuba. The Cuban and American veterans of the CIA’s secre
t war they briefly detained, however, were not out of action for long. It was soon obvious that they were again active at camps near New Orleans, where Lee Oswald was by now involved in his own Cuban activities.
Anti-Castro exiles had been training for some time at Lacombe, a camp a few miles outside New Orleans where David Ferrie was by one account an instructor.8 In late July, after an influx of guerilla trainees, federal agents raided a property in the area, seizing explosives, napalm, and bomb casings. The property was controlled by William McLaney who, with his brother, Mike, had operated out of Havana during the heyday of gambling before the Castro revolution.9 After the raid, Carlos Bringuier, the exile who a few days later would be involved in the New Orleans fracas with Oswald, helped coordinate the dispersal of the exile trainees.
Among those detained or formally cautioned in the raid were a number of American advisers, including members of a group called Interpen—more grandly known as the Intercontinental Penetration Force. They included Alexander Rorke and Frank Sturgis, both of whom had persistently flouted government orders ever since the Missile Crisis. Rorke would die on a mission before the Kennedy assassination. Sturgis went on to gain notoriety years later as one of the Watergate burglars controlled by the exiles’ CIA champion, Howard Hunt.
Sturgis’ anti-Castro group reportedly received financing from the Mafia. Several of his associates arrested during the Kennedy clampdown were names that would later crop up in assassination-related evidence. One was Loran Hall, who had previously been in detention in Cuba along with Mafia boss Santo Trafficante—and will feature significantly at a later point in this book.
As so often in this labyrinthine tale, the names and the threads of evidence interconnect and merge under the common denominator of American intelligence and the Mafia. Here were some of the men most stung by the Kennedy clampdown on freelance anti-Castro operations. “Those individuals sponsoring this activity,” a 1970s Senate Intelligence Committee report was to note in masterly understatement, “were angered.”
They must have been angriest at the message implied by the official statement that explained the government raids to the public. The raid on the Mafia-backed camp near New Orleans was described as designed to thwart “an effort to carry out a military operation against a country with which the United States is at peace.”
The United States at peace with Castro’s Cuba, true or not, was a notion the exiles and their backers would never accept.
Soon after the government closures of unauthorized training camps, and within a month of the alleged meeting between Oswald and the U.S. intelligence officer who used the name Bishop, the alleged assassin began the next and fateful phase of his Cuba-related activity. On September 17, 1963, Oswald walked into the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans and applied for a tourist card, the document necessary for entry to Mexico.
He had no difficulty in obtaining the card, for he was equipped with a copy of his birth certificate and a brand-new passport—the latest product of the former defector’s improbably smooth relationship with the State Department. He had applied for the passport two months earlier, just before the start of his pro-Castro program in New Orleans, specifying on the application form—just as he had in 1959—that he intended to travel to the Soviet Union. He had even drawn attention to his inglorious past, acknowledging that his previous passport had been canceled.
Oswald’s application went to the Passport Office of the State Department in Washington, DC, directed in those days by Frances Knight, a dragon of a bureaucrat famous for her stern restrictions on the movement of American leftists. On this occasion, however, the system seemed oddly paralyzed. No official queried the intentions of this self-declared Marxist who had once offered state secrets to the Soviets. Nobody was concerned, it seemed, about the possibility of a second defection. Oswald had his passport within twenty-four hours.
At the Mexican Consulate a few weeks later, he was promptly issued Tourist Card number 824085. It was a process that in due course would lead to a further—and baffling—CIA blip on the radar of the Oswald story.
Next to Oswald’s name, at number 824084 on the list of all other people who applied for Mexican entry papers in New Orleans on September 17, was that of one William Gaudet. He had been a source for the CIA as far back as the late 1940s and, in the fall of 1963, was Mexico-bound at the same time as Oswald.
The author located Gaudet fifteen years later, living out his retirement at a seaside home in Mississippi. Pressed to explain how he came to be next to Lee Oswald on the list of applications for travel to Mexico, he said, “It is apparently because we both went into the Consulate one after the other… . It was pure coincidence and ah … because I certainly had not discussed it with him, because I hadn’t talked to him… . I have no control over what the CIA did or did not do down in Mexico.”
Gaudet’s CIA file revealed only that he “provided foreign intelligence information” in the 1950s, and mentioned no contact after 1961. Gaudet, however, himself said he had contact with the CIA as late as 1969. He agreed that he was “just loaded down with coincidences” and that his appearance on the visa list was astonishing. On his September 1963 trip, he thought, he had merely passed through Mexico City in transit.
Gaudet said that, under cover of running a publication called the Latin American Newsletter, he worked for the CIA for more than twenty years. It was a secret connection, one that he confided to no one—not even his wife. Though retired, he was angry and suspicious about the way his name had been revealed—angry especially that his cover had been blown. “I am now convinced in my own mind,” he said, “that those who are truly behind the conspiracy to kill Mr. Kennedy have done things purposely to draw attention to me.”
While denying any involvement in the Oswald visit to Mexico, Gaudet said Oswald had been “known to him” in New Orleans. Then, adjusting the statement, he asserted that he had merely observed Oswald handing out leaflets in the street on several occasions. Gaudet had apparently observed him enough, nevertheless, to assess him as a “very nervous, frail, weak man.”
After a few hours with William Gaudet, an interviewer came away, rightly or wrongly, with an impression of a man who knew more—perhaps only a little more—than he was prepared to discuss on the record. What he did say seemed intended to protect his own, probably innocent, role, out of indignation that his CIA cover had been blown.
During a second visit by the author, Gaudet let slip something that at the time meant little but in hindsight seemed more significant than his appearance on the Mexico visa list. It happened when the author became openly skeptical that Gaudet could have gained his obvious knowledge of Oswald purely from “coincidental” sightings in the streets of New Orleans. “I do know,” Gaudet said then, “that I saw him one time with a former FBI agent by the name of Guy Banister… . What Guy’s role in all of this was I … really don’t know.” Gaudet had paused briefly, but now said in a rush, “I did see Oswald discussing various things with Banister at the time, and I think Banister knew a whole lot of what was going on.” He also said, “I suppose you are looking into Ferrie. He was with Oswald.”10
Gaudet had seen Oswald with Banister, he volunteered, “near my office, which was at Camp Street and Common Street in New Orleans.” This meant, of course, that Gaudet’s office was a stone’s throw from Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street, the address that appears to link Oswald to anti-Castro activity—the very opposite of what he ostensibly stood for.11
The New Orleans connection is pivotal, whether one believes President Kennedy’s murder was the work of Oswald alone, Cuban exiles, the Mafia, some element of American intelligence, or a synthesis of all three. Once again in this case, the leads come full circle.
Reasonably enough, Gaudet balked at the idea that the CIA as an agency had any involvement in the assassination. He thought, though, that there was a tie-in that would embarrass the CIA, that it was “extremely possible” that Oswald had
been used by some element of American intelligence. Gaudet found nothing contradictory in the fact that the CIA has repeatedly denied any connection with Oswald. He said of his own CIA service, “They told me frankly when I did things for them that if something went awry they would never recognize me or admit who I was. If I made a mistake, that was just tough, and I knew it.”
Gaudet did not believe Oswald killed the President. He said, “I think he was a patsy. I think he was set up on purpose.” Asked to explain, he subsided into silence.
On September 16, 1963, just a day before Oswald applied for papers to travel to Mexico, a CIA officer briefed a senior Bureau counterpart on new plans for action against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. “John Tilton, CIA,” a senior FBI agent reported, “advised that his Agency is giving some consideration to countering the activities of [the Fair Play for Cuba Committee] in foreign countries … CIA is also giving some thought to planting deceptive information which might embarrass the Committee [author’s emphasis] in areas where it does have some support. Pursuant to a discussion with the Liaison Agent, Tilton advised that his Agency will not take action without first consulting the Bureau, bearing in mind that we wish to make certain the CIA activity will not jeopardize any Bureau investigation.”
As reported in these pages, U.S. intelligence had long been engaged in “countering activities,” penetrating, discrediting, and smearing the FPCC. Mexico City was a place where the Committee was well supported, a fact that made its local chapter a target for the attention of American agents.
For a few days after obtaining his Mexican visa, Oswald busied himself writing a summary of his achievements as a Marxist activist in the service of socialism. The high point of the narrative, following a catalog of his diligent studies and sojourn in Russia, was his pro-Castro effort in New Orleans. As he had done in the past when he had urgent work to do on his own, Oswald got rid of his wife for a while. They would never again live together as husband and wife. Marina, burdened with one child and pregnant with a second, left to stay with her friend Ruth Paine in Texas.
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 28