Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  A fifteen-minute break in broadcasting followed, broken only by the tones of the American national anthem on the radio. “Strange indeed was the impression,” Daniel wrote, “on hearing this anthem ring out in the house of Fidel Castro, in the midst of a circle of worried faces… . ‘Now,’ Fidel said, ‘they will have to find the assassin quickly, otherwise you wait and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing… .’ ”

  Castro and Daniel were on the road in a car, still listening to the radio, when a commentator suggested that the alleged assassin was “a spy married to a Russian.” It would be his turn next, Castro said, and so in a sense it was. Word came that Oswald had been a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and a Castro admirer. “If they had had proof,” Castro said, “they would have said he was an agent, a hired killer. In saying simply that he is an admirer, this is just to try and make an association in people’s minds between the name of Castro and the emotion awakened by the assassination. This is a publicity method, a propaganda device. It’s terrible.” As the radio began calling Oswald a “pro-Castro Marxist,” Castro canceled his planned schedule and—Daniel believed—ordered a state of alert.

  Castro had been right about the reflex reaction of many in the United States. Newspaper editorials were to speak darkly of “The Enemy Without,” and a Gallup Poll revealed that a large number of Americans thought Russia, Cuba, or “the Communists” were involved. In Dallas on the night of the assassination, Assistant District Attorney William Alexander spoke of charging Oswald with having murdered the President “as part of an international Communist conspiracy.”

  President Johnson, already back in Washington, DC, saw to it that there would be no such charge. Henry Wade, the District Attorney himself, would recall receiving not one but three calls from an aide to the new President. “Washington’s word to me,” he said, “was that it would hurt foreign relations if I alleged a conspiracy… . I went down to the police department … to make sure the Dallas police didn’t involve any foreign country in the assassination.”

  At the very start of his presidency, Johnson had acted to prevent what he thought could potentially be global catastrophe. It was a measure that will surely endure as an act of sanity and statesmanship. Nevertheless, the new President himself would come to suspect there had been a conspiracy, and that Castro had been involved. He was to share variations on that theme with at least five people, none of whom would feel free to speak publicly until after his death.

  “I’ll tell you something that will rock you,” he told ABC TV’s Howard K. Smith in 1968, just before the end of his own presidency, “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first… . It will all come out someday.” Out of office, during an interview with CBS’s Walter Cronkite, he said he had never been “completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections… . I don’t think we ought to discuss the suspicions, because there’s not any hard evidence that Oswald was directed by a foreign government… . He was quite a mysterious fellow, and he did have connections that bore examination.”2

  In 1971, over coffee with Leo Janos, one of his former speechwriters, he said he had “never believed Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.” He explained that the United States “had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” and speculated that the assassination had been retaliation for the CIA’s efforts. Finally, not long before his own death in 1973, he told Hearst columnist Marianne Means that he thought Oswald had shot his predecessor “because he was under either the influence or the orders of Castro.”3

  Kennedy’s successor had spoken off the record, surely guessing that one or all of his listeners would publish his remarks once he was gone. So they did, and it was tantalizing stuff. Contrary to what Johnson had told ABC’s Smith, however, evidence that Castro had a hand in the assassination has not “all come out.”

  What really triggered Johnson’s suspicion, encouraging the notion of a Castro hit, was an account he heard in 1967 from the columnist Drew Pearson—as had others, including Earl Warren. Pearson and his colleague Jack Anderson, for their part, had received their information from a prominent Washington attorney named Edward Morgan. Morgan, in turn, was retailing a story offered by his client—none other than John Roselli, the Mafia gangster who had helped the CIA in the early plots to kill Castro.

  Top mobsters do not push to get stories into the press out of a sense of public duty. Roselli’s motive? The House Assassinations Committee, noting that his story of Cuba-related skullduggery coincided with the mobster’s efforts to avoid prosecution and deportation back to Italy, thought it possible that Roselli “manipulated public perception of the plots … to get the CIA to intervene in his legal problems, as the price for his agreeing to make no further disclosures.”

  The story Roselli peddled had three main elements: that mobsters had at one point been recruited to assist the CIA in attempting to assassinate Castro, that Robert Kennedy may have approved efforts to kill the Cuban leader, and that Castro riposted by sending assassins to the United States to kill President Kennedy. The first two elements, as described in these pages, were factual. The third element, however, had no substance to it. The best Roselli came up with to support his allegation of Castro involvement was that he and associates had received “feedback furnished by [unidentified] sources close to Castro.” This was a slender reed on which to hang the allegation that preoccupied Johnson to the end of his life.4 On the basis of barely any solid information, however, the insinuation that Castro had a hand in the Kennedy assassination proved durable.

  There was something that appeared to nourish the suspicion that Castro retaliated against President Kennedy, a statement the Cuban leader himself had reportedly made two months before the assassination.

  On the night of September 7, 1963, while attending a reception at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana, Castro had settled down in a chair and uttered a stream of vituperation against John F. Kennedy. He had called the President “a cretin … the Batista of his times … the most opportunistic American President of all time.” He had denounced recent exile raids and said—according to the report filed by Daniel Harker of Associated Press—“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe [author’s emphasis].”5

  Had the Cuban leader very loudly issued a public warning—one he wanted to be heard in Washington—that he was aware of American plans to kill him or senior colleagues, and would respond in kind? The Cuban leader was to deny it repeatedly, most formally in 1978 to House Assassinations Committee members and staff who visited Havana.

  “I said,” he asserted, referring to the much-quoted comment, “something like those plots start to set a very bad precedent … that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions … but I did not mean to threaten… . [It was] rather, like warning that we knew … I didn’t say it as a threat… . For three years, we had known there were plots against us … the conversation came about very casually, you know.”

  The idea that Cuba could have been involved in President Kennedy’s death, Castro said, was “insane … I never heard anyone suggest or even speculate about a measure of that sort, because who could think of the idea of organizing the death of the President of the United States? That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have been trying to prevent all these years… . What could we gain from a war with the United States? The United States would lose nothing. The destruction would have been here.”

  Cuba’s Marxist policy, Castro told other interviewers, left “no room for liquidation of leaders of any social system through terrorist acts.” During the bitter struggle to overthrow Batista, Castro’s forces did not try to kill the hated dictator. In the fall of 1963, in light of the sec
ret dialogue about accommodation, would it have made sense for Castro to plot Kennedy’s death? Had he been so duplicitous, he told the Committee, U.S. retaliation would almost certainly have swept away the revolution and Castro with it. Castro was aware too, that, even had Cuba’s role not been discovered, there was the possibility that a successor to Kennedy would prove as tough or even tougher toward Cuba.

  There is another reason to doubt that Castro’s reported remark at the Brazilian Embassy was a real threat to President Kennedy’s life, a reason he did not articulate himself. Had he really intended harm to the President, would Castro have announced it to the press two months in advance?

  The Assassinations Committee considered the fact that news of Castro’s “threat” remark had been published in New Orleans just a few weeks before Oswald’s trip to Mexico City. If Oswald read the story, might he have convinced himself that killing the President would make him a sort of revolutionary hero?

  That idea hardly squared with the consistent evidence that Oswald thought well of President Kennedy. In custody after the assassination, asked whether he thought Cuba would be better off with the President dead, Oswald replied that, “since the President was killed someone would take his place, perhaps Vice President Johnson, and … his views would probably be largely the same as those of President Kennedy.”

  Oswald’s statements before the assassination carry more weight, but leave the same impression. Asked in the radio debate in New Orleans whether he agreed with Castro’s remarks that President Kennedy was a “ruffian and a thief,” Oswald said he did not agree with that wording. He thought, however, that the CIA and the State Department had made “monumental mistakes” over Cuba.

  Lieutenant Martello, the police intelligence officer who spoke with Oswald after the street fracas in New Orleans, recalled that Oswald “in no way demonstrated any animosity or ill-feeling toward President Kennedy… . He showed in his manner of speaking that he liked the President.” No one ever would make a credible allegation that the alleged assassin had anything but good to say about John F. Kennedy.

  The House Assassinations Committee found “persuasive reasons to conclude that the Cuban government was not involved in the Kennedy assassination.” Were the multiple stories that seemed to link Oswald to Castro’s Cuba merely opportunistic efforts, after the fact, to turn the assassination to propaganda advantage? Or is it possible that some of them were part of a conspiracy designed to do away with President Kennedy and—by linking Oswald to Havana—provoke U.S. retaliation against Cuba, even at the risk of causing a nuclear conflict?

  The evidence suggests that painting a track of guilt that led to Havana was deliberate, even perhaps preconceived.

  At noon on November 25, the day after the real Oswald had been silenced forever, a young Nicaraguan named Gilberto Alvarado walked into the American Embassy in Mexico City.6 What he had to say was so important, he said, that he had to see the Ambassador himself. During a visit to the Cuban Consulate in mid-September, he claimed, he had seen Oswald on a patio talking with a thin black man. They had then been joined by a tall Cuban who passed money to the black man. Then, Alvarado asserted, he heard the black man tell Oswald in English, “I want to kill the man.” Oswald replied, “You’re not man enough—I can do it.” To which the black man responded in Spanish, “I can’t go with you. I have a lot to do.” Oswald replied, “The people are waiting for me back there.” The black man then handed Oswald $6,500 in large-denomination notes, adding by way of apology, “This isn’t much.” And the supposed meeting ended.

  Alvarado claimed he had tried to warn the Embassy about all this before the assassination, but had been rebuffed as a time waster. Now, his account set the wires humming between Mexico City and Washington. It seemed there could be something to it—CIA staff knew from surveillance coverage that an “Oswald” had visited the Cuban Consulate. Ambassador Thomas Mann, who had expressed suspicion of Cuba within hours of the assassination, urged his staff to give Alvarado’s tale serious attention.

  Alvarado’s claim was flashed to Washington for the attention of the FBI and the State Department—and the White House, where it became one of the first pieces of “evidence” to sow the idea of a Castro conspiracy in the new President’s mind. Twenty-four hours later, the CIA reported information “from a sensitive and reliable source” that tended to confirm Alvarado’s story.

  “In reading Oswald’s rather complete dossier,” Ambassador Mann explained in a later message, “I did not get an impression of a man who would kill a person he had never met for a cause, without offers from the apparatus to which he apparently belonged, when there was nothing in it for him. I therefore had a feeling—subjective and unproven to be sure—that either in Mexico or the United States someone had given him an assignment and money… . Castro is the kind of person who would avenge himself in this way.” The Ambassador reminded Washington of the AP story of September that had quoted Castro as saying U.S. leaders would “not be safe.”

  On November 27, the Embassy’s legal attaché relayed a press statement put out by a “former Cuban diplomat”—a prominent exile—that stretched what AP’s “threat” story had actually said. In the diplomat’s version, Castro had said, “Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves, since they, too, can be the victims of an attempt which will cause their death.”

  Washington reacted very cautiously. An FBI supervisor, Laurence Keenan, was sent to Mexico with orders to damp down any suggestion of conspiracy. He stressed to Ambassador Mann that the FBI position was—as it was to remain—that Oswald and Oswald alone had killed the President. The State Department, for its part, sent Mann a telegram he never forgot. Years later, when interviewed by the author, he was still irritated by what he recalled as “an instruction from Washington to cease investigation.” Even as the Ambassador fumed, however, it was becoming apparent that there was something rum about Alvarado’s story.

  Questioned by Mexican officials, the young Nicaraguan admitted that his story had been a fabrication. He had never seen Oswald, had not seen money change hands, had not tried to alert the American Embassy before the assassination. Then, however, when U.S. officials continued to show interest, he reverted to the original story and claimed that the Mexicans had pressured him into the retraction. A polygraph test, however, indicated that he might be lying. Alvarado then acknowledged that he “must be mistaken,” was uncertain when the incident had occurred, and said he had merely seen “someone who looked like Oswald.” Officials in Washington, DC, decided once and for all that there was nothing to the story.

  In Mexico City, Ambassador Mann still felt Alvarado should have been flown to the United States for further questioning. In that he was right. Having apparently lied made Alvarado no less relevant to the investigation. For the nature of his story, and his background, suggested that the attempt to tie Castro to the assassination had been no spur-of-the-moment impulse.

  Consider Alvarado’s claim that he heard Oswald tell his companion, “You’re not man enough [to kill the man]. I can do it.” That echoed almost exactly what Silvia Odio in Dallas had been told by her mysterious anti-Castro visitor “Leopoldo.” Alvarado, too, quoted Oswald as having said that Cuban exiles “don’t have any guts … should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs.” The two accounts could be from the same bad film script—but by what scriptwriter?

  Alvarado said he was a Nicaraguan intelligence agent, that he had been at the Cuban Embassy on a mission to try to get into Cuba. The Nicaraguans denied it, claiming to the contrary that he was a known Communist—an implausible suggestion to make about an individual who had tried to implicate Communist Cuba in the assassination. The Americans believed Alvarado was indeed a Nicaraguan agent. A CIA document notes that he had been a “regular informant of the Nicaraguan secret service, an officer of which has provided this agency with [Alvarado’s] reports for over a year.”

  Then Nicaraguan dictator Lu
is Somoza was an avid supporter of the anti-Castro exiles, as was natural for Central America’s version of the former Cuban dictator Batista. His country had served as a principal assembly point for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and remained open house for the CIA and its Cuban protégés. Nicaragua hosted anti-Castro leader Manuel Artime, who commanded two bases in the country and had a role in the CIA plot to kill Castro using Rolando Cubela. Artime’s associate and friend was Howard Hunt, the Agency propaganda specialist who said he had been one of the first to recommend that Castro be killed.7

  In spite of the holes in Alvarado’s claim about Oswald, his allegation was brought to President Johnson’s attention on at least three occasions and for some time remained a live issue.8 Even as that allegation lost its head of steam, moreover, others proliferated.9

  On December 2, a new Mexico City witness came up with a variation on Alvarado’s theme. Pedro Gutiérrez, a credit investigator, sent a letter to President Johnson saying that that he, too, had seen Oswald being handed money—by his account—outside the Cuban Embassy. Gutiérrez’s story, which caused further extensive investigation, led nowhere. He turned out to be a zealous anti-Communist with a background of agitation.

  Within a day of Gutiérrez’s allegation, a “sensitive source” told the CIA about a Cubana Airlines flight that had supposedly been delayed for hours at the Mexico City airport on the night of the assassination—waiting for a mysterious passenger. When he at last arrived, by private aircraft, he had allegedly traveled on to Havana concealed from fellow passengers in the pilot’s cabin. Checks revealed that, in fact, the Cuban aircraft had left for Havana before the second plane arrived. Another claim that led nowhere.10