by Gus Russo
Unable to enlist the help of Castro’s protectors, Rothman returned to Miami, where he bought a hotel with Batista’s relatives. Soon, the bodyguard he had attempted to enlist, Frank Sturgis, turned against Castro and fled to Miami, where he hooked up with Rothman. From unknown sources, Rothman channeled money to Sturgis’ new anti-Castro group, The International Anti-Communist Brigade.13
Sheffield Edwards next contacted former FBI man/Howard Hughes aide/CIA freelancer, Robert Maheu.14 The CIA’s James O’Connell was assigned as Maheu’s case officer.
“I’m no saint,” Maheu has said. “I am a religious man, and I knew that the CIA was talking about murder.” O’Connell told Maheu, however, that the U.S. and Cuba were, in effect, at war, and drew Hitlerian analogies. “If Fidel, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara were assassinated, thousands of lives might be saved,” O’Connell told the reluctant go-between. Wrestling with his decision at home the night Edwards contacted him, Maheu finally assented to the CIA’s requests.15
Johnny Rosselli, whose name had been floated during the previous Rothman plot attempts, was the point man the CIA selected to implement the assassination plots. He was the Mafia’s “Mr. Smooth,” assigned to run operations in Los Angeles in the 1930’s, and later in Las Vegas, where he oversaw the mob’s takeover of the gambling industry. Maheu’s role was to draw Mr. Smooth into the operation. Maheu had met Rosselli in the spring of 1959 in Las Vegas. Like many before him, Maheu was charmed by Rosselli, and later wrote that he considered him a friend.
“Me? You want me to get involved with Uncle Sam?” responded an astonished Rosselli on meeting with Maheu in L.A. “The Feds are tailing me wherever I go. . . Bob, are you sure you’re talking to the right guy?” Maheu eventually succeeded in convincing Rosselli to come aboard for the project. Although some have speculated that Rosselli was attempting to leverage a deal in order to get the government off his back, Maheu remembers it differently. “The truth, as corny as it may sound, is that down deep he thought it was his patriotic duty,” Maheu later wrote.16
After being recruited by Maheu, Rosselli introduced (the CIA’s) O’Connell to Sam Giancana, boss of the Chicago mob, and Santos Trafficante, who had been the Mafioso in charge of the casinos in pre-Castro Havana. Like the White House, the mobsters wanted back into Cuba, and told O’Connell that they could find a Cuban to kill Castro.
The initial planning meeting was held in Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau Hotel, where the assassins-to-be were offered $150,000 by the U.S. government to kill Fidel Castro. O’Connell told the mobsters he wanted Castro gunned down in a gangland-style killing, à la “The Untouchables.” The Mafiosi rejected this as too dangerous and suggested something “nice and clean”—poison in the form of pills or something else that would disappear without a trace. Months later, the CIA’s Technical Services Division perfected a botulism toxin, which Maheu passed, in the form of deadly capsules, to a Cuban at the same Fontainebleau Hotel.17
After the Kennedy administration had been installed, a news service reported that Castro was ill, and in fact, on his deathbed. The planners assumed that their poison pill had been involved. According to Joe Shimon, who attended some of the Fontainebleau sessions, Robert Maheu called him, saying, “Boy, we’ve got it made. Bobby’s going to be very happy!” (Shimon would later say that the news accounts were planted by Castro, who knew in advance that the plotters were coming. “Castro wasn’t even sick,” Shimon said. “The people that took that stuff over there disappeared.”)18
In fact, the Giancana gambit was a total disaster, but not for Castro. Although the U.S. government shelled out $150,000 to the “don’s” organization, the contacts Giancana provided never delivered. (There is also a widespread belief that Giancana himself never intended on following through—his agreement with the feds was a scam to ease FBI harassment of him.19)
Although it has been widely reported that the U.S. government engaged members of organized crime to assassinate Fidel Castro as a prelude to the Bay of Pigs invasion, it is not so well-known that Cuban exile murder teams were working in league with the CIA toward that same end.
“I volunteered to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the Americans took me up on it,” says Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban exile and longtime CIA agent. According to Rodriguez, while the Kennedy administration was being installed in January 1961, his CIA superior provided him with a “beautiful German bolt-action rifle” and a backup support team. The team was transported to a “safe house” in the Florida Keys, where they trained. The team made three attempted infiltrations into Cuba, two of which were thwarted by Castro’s patrol boats. The third attempt was scrubbed by the American advisors, who unbeknownst to Rodriguez’ “Grey Team,” had shifted their hopes to yet another Cuban hit squad.20
In 1975, Congress heard testimony from a CIA officer who admitted to being in charge of the pre-invasion assassination attempts. That officer, John Henry Stephens, a Covert Actions Operations officer on loan to the CIA from Special Forces, told investigators of two occasions where he led five-man assassination teams. After training in Guatemala, the teams were flown over the island and parachuted in. His team members were not Cubans, but “Poles, Germans, or Americans.” His teams, he testified, were equipped with “assassination packages,” consisting of a variety of weapons, including grenades and an “assassination gun.”
Stephens, now deceased, told his family at the time of the inquiry that the committee was pressing for more details. According to his sister, Flora May Stephens, John told the family little of the operation. His training in Latin America was so secretive that the family didn’t hear from him for three months and presumed him dead. Later, he confided that the CIA wanted complete deniability should he be captured. He went into the island under the name “John Simpson.” At the time of the Congressional hearings, Stephens told his sister, “They’re trying to make me talk. But if I talk, I die.”21 Stephens gave the investigators operational details, but no names. The Congressional summary of the Stephens interview states:
This gun was a 9 mm. weapon made in England, of which there were only “9 or 10 in the world.” It consisted of two pieces of pipe, which when disconnected from each other, looked like simple pieces of pipe rather than a weapon. These pieces screwed together into a “clip,” containing ammunition and a firing mechanism, and was inserted into one piece, creating a gun. According to Stephens, the gun, when fired, made only a slight “woosh” sound, and was otherwise silent.22
CIA cables released in 1994, not necessarily connected to Stephens’ operation, shed more light on assassination operations going on at the time, which were overseen by a CIA Cuba group known as “Branch Four.” In late March 1961, cables began arriving at CIA headquarters from a Cuban plotter, code-named “NOTLOX.” The messages were addressed to “JMBELL,” and said, in part:
(March 23): I told Luis Bueno to ask your opinion regarding sabotage of electric company in order to leave Havana ten days without power. We can coordinate with attempt against Fidel. Suggest attempt against Fidel in accordance with general plan. Reply urgent, Monty
(Plan (4) 9 April): Fidel will talk at the Palace. Assassination attempt at said place followed by a general shutting off of main electric in Havana. . . Answer before 1 April. Agent 2637 (pictured page 55)
[NAMES DELETED] was advised below-listed names provided by Guat secret service with statement they [are] all Cubans except as noted who are on way or in Guat with mission assassination.
Brigade leader Raphael Quintero recently disclosed, “I was part of that NOTLOX plot. There was going to be a big boxing match and we knew Castro was supposed to be present. We planned to have him hit with a bazooka.” Quintero says that the CIA gave the final go-ahead to another exile group, but it was ill-equipped for the mission.23 Other cables referred to an airdrop of “Springfield rifles with telescopic sights,” presumably to have been used for the NOTLOX attempt.
After the Bay of Pigs failure in April, the assassination plotting continued. On May 3, 196
1, JMBELL received a cable from a Cuban agent code-named TEKLOK. The cable stated:
We are contacting all groups (DOS) to organize one united front with a coordinator. You name him or we elect him. Tell us. Will try kill Fidel today. Andres OK but still hiding. His men gone to hill. Want to know what can be used. Luis Jorge (pictured page 56)
These attempts continued after the Bay of Pigs, according to other cables. Here is one example. On June 4, 1961, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans (DDP) Richard Helms received the following:
Functionary Italian Embassy by the name of Moratori says he works for one intelligence organization of yours, he says he is in contact with Martin Elena and others and that you have plans for invasion within 30 days after killing Fidel, advise if we can confide in Moratori.24
Despite the attempted secrecy, Castro’s intelligence apparatus had, typically, penetrated the plots from the start, dooming them to disaster. In the first of Stephens’ attempts, one member of the parachuted-in team actually succeeded in reaching his appointed hotel site on the island. Upon entering his room, he radioed Stephens in Guatemala. Stephens testified that this individual’s radio transmission was interrupted by gunfire and no more was heard from him. On the second attempt, two men were captured or killed at the drop zone where they made their parachute landing in Cuba.
After the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion, a number of laughably futile plans were concocted to bring about Castro’s demise. Some of the earliest attempts on Castro were designed to destroy his character, if not his person. The plotters had hoped to at least erode Castro’s public image, or as one Congressional investigator called it, “the magnetic charisma he seemed to exert for the Cuban people.”25 One idea was to be carried out during Castro’s trips out of the country. When he left his boots outside his hotel door for polishing, the CIA would sprinkle thallium, a strong depilatory, into them. As a consequence, the CIA determined, Castro’s beard would fall out, and his rule would be irreparably weakened without the symbol of his masculinity and power. The CIA abandoned the scheme when intelligence determined that Castro’s trips abroad were infrequent and well guarded.
Subsequent attempts were, in the summary of the same Congressional investigator (Loch Johnson), “still more fantastic, requiring a suspension of disbelief few serious novelists would ask of their readers.” One focused on Castro’s cigars, which were to be impregnated with a chemical that would cause temporary disorientation. There was also a plan to spread the word on Cuba that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and that he would vanquish the anti-Christ Castro. A submarine would then surface near the island and send up starshells—supposedly a manifestation of the Second Coming, which would lead to Castro’s overthrow. Walt Elder, Assistant to the CIA Director, sarcastically referred to this plan as “elimination by illumination.”26 “This is absolutely true,” an intelligence officer felt it necessary to assure the Church Committee, which investigated these plots some 15 years later.
Plot followed plot—the latest more overwrought than the last: using the deadly botulism poison on his cigars to kill on contact; placing a bomb in an exotic seashell certain to attract Castro’s attention when he went skin diving; exploding the bomb from a nearby submarine; or just having an intermediary present Castro with the gift of a skin diving suit contaminated with still another exotic poison.
The Story of Lt. Commander John Gordon III (USN)
It now appears that assassination plots employed not only Cuban exiles and mobsters, but also Naval Intelligence officers, gamblers, or anyone else who seemed to have access to Fidel Castro’s person.
“The last words that were said to me when I left Washington were, ‘Get Castro!’ It was an ugly business.” Quoting these instructions, a senior officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) describes his marching orders as he prepared to leave for his command post at the Navy’s Guantanamo (Cuba) Base in the wake of the Bay of Pigs defeat. “It was a shooting war going on down there,” remembers the officer, who prefers to remain anonymous. “Castro shot thirty base employees one morning.”27 Like the pre-Bay of Pigs plots supervised by John Stephens, these post-Bay of Pigs attempts were also thwarted by Castro’s superior intelligence operation. The ONI officer remembers, “Castro was picking up on these things as fast as they got started.”
John Gordon, one ONI officer given the task of furthering the Kennedy administration’s murder plots, would suffer for three decades as a result of his involvement in the futile schemes. By 1961, 40 year old career Naval Intelligence Officer John Gordon III had established himself as a man with a bright future in the military. Successful tours overseas and assignments with the brass in the Pentagon made it clear to all that he was on a fast track. He would gain his Ph.D. in maritime history from Harvard, and become the senior researcher for a renowned Harvard historian, Samuel Elliott Morison. Later, he would become an assistant professor of maritime history at Framingham State College, a prestigious New England institution of higher learning, and eventually the director of a college in South Carolina, where he remained until his death in 1987.28
But in 1961 something happened to John Gordon that caused permanent mental anguish, characterized by periods of isolation and hospital stays for nervous breakdowns. He never talked in detail about what happened that summer, but left enough small bits of information around for those who needed to know—his family, closest friends, and attorneys—that it is possible to piece the story together for the first time. Gordon left behind documents that he urged his family to keep in a safe place. The documents were coded, cut up into six parts, and sent to six different family members, with the key to the code left behind for his daughter to find at the author’s urging. A surprising amount of his story would be corroborated by a future Congressional investigation (see Chapter Nineteen).
In the spring of 1961, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Gordon became aware of a secret meeting at the Pentagon held to determine how to deal with the victorious Castro. Gordon would later tell his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, that those present included CIA Director Allen Dulles, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The result of this meeting was to direct certain Naval Intelligence officers in Guantanamo, Cuba to oversee an assassination plot against Fidel and Raul Castro.
Burke, who had once received a medal from former Cuban leader Batista, was on record as favoring the assassination plots. At the National Security Council’s Special Group meeting of March 9, 1961, Burke stated “that any plan for the removal of Cuban leaders should be a package deal, since many of the leaders around Castro were even worse than Castro.”29 (Two years later, when it was believed that Admiral Burke might oppose Kennedy in the upcoming 1964 presidential elections, his personal files on Cuba [including those possibly pertaining to Gordon] were stolen. Burke believed the culprit was a member of Kennedy’s team.30 Given how involved Burke was, there’s reason to think he may have been right.)
In an interesting coincidence, when Bobby Kennedy’s phone logs were (partially) released in 1994, a June 7, 1961 “while you were out” message—at the time Gordon was getting set up in Guantanamo—showed that Bobby Kennedy received a call from the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Chief J.C. King, the originator of the Castro assassination plots in 1959.31 King, as noted by Bobby’s secretary, called to say he “has info about five Cubans that Mr. [Bobby] K asked him to find out about.”
It was in this spring of 1961 that Gordon, accompanied by his wife and two children, relocated to “Gitmo.” He became the acting officer in charge of Intelligence there. Gordon once showed his daughter Heather his military records, pointing out a two month gap in the summer of 1961 (while they were in Guantanamo). Gordon’s sister Caroline recalls, “He told me he met with Bobby Kennedy in Guantanamo also. He didn’t respect Bobby. All John told me was that something was supposed to happen that didn’t.”
John Gordon’s assistant in the Field Intelligence Office was Jack Modesett. Mod
esett introduced Gordon around the base to both the military and the local Cubans. Modesett denies vehemently that there was any talk then of an assassination. However, when pressed, he admits, “There was something regarding Raul [Castro] that I don’t think I can talk about.”32 Gordon’s close friend, historian, and college director Mack Daniels remembers, “John told me he was involved in some planning in Guantanamo. I always assumed he meant the Bay of Pigs. He never told me the details. He did once say something about the assassination of Castro, but I didn’t pay much attention.”34
According to his daughter Heather, John Gordon worked around the clock, pushing himself to the point of total exhaustion. John spoke fluent Spanish and was always having Cubans over to their home. “I remember dad going out at night in civilian clothes with a Cuban named ‘Big Louie.’”34 The Cubans told Gordon’s wife about plots to kill Castro, and their suspicion that one of their associates named Gonzalez was a double agent, reporting back to the Cuban dictator. Gordon’s daughter remembers November 22, 1963: “When President Kennedy was killed, and it was announced that a man with Cuban ties had been arrested and was seeking a lawyer well-known for defending communists, dad pointed to Oswald and said, ‘He’s a dead man.’ To his dying day he felt that Oswald was hired by Cuba in retaliation.” John Gordon would often tell his family, “That bastard Bobby got his brother shot.”
In early 1964, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, Gordon sent coded documents detailing sites, operational details, and a list of over 50 of his Gitmo contacts to six family members. His daughter retained “the key” document. The operation was code-named “OP # 922H 2 D4” later changed to “922H 1E.” Some of the shooters brought in, included on the list, were Luis Balbuena, also known as “E1 Gordo” (most likely “Big Louie” from daughter Heather’s memory) and Alonzo Gonzalez.35