by Gus Russo
The hands-on control of any Cuban initiative, as usual, would fall to the younger brother. JFK suggested to Artime, “Talk to my brother Bob.”11 By January 1963, Artime and other exile leaders were being treated to ski vacations in New Hampshire with the Attorney General. Angelo Kennedy says of their relationship: “Bobby and Artime were very close. Artime stayed at his house so much I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a set of keys.” For a time, Artime’s close associate, Manolo Reboso (also a confidante of RFK), even shared a girlfriend with the President. According to Gerry Hemming, Reboso dated longtime JFK mistress, Pam Turnure, Jackie’s appointment secretary.12
Though many exile groups would soon come to feel the wrath of “the crackdown,” one would have gotten an entirely different impression from the topics being discussed around the fireplace in January 1963. The talk revolved around finding new ways to get rid of “that guy with the beard.” The secret meetings, from which Cuban Coordinating Committee member Al Haig was excluded, soon shifted to Bobby’s home and office.
It was a tricky balancing act for Artime, because most Cuban exiles distrusted the Kennedy brothers after their Bay of Pigs performance. According to “Macho” Barker, “Artime was able to work with President Kennedy and not hate him, saying, ‘Well, he’s human. The important thing is that he makes restitution for the mistake.’ And it sure looked like he was going to.”13
At that time, Manuel Hernandez was Artime’s Washington liaison.14 In a 1998 interview, he recalled, “I used to drive Artime to these meetings at Bobby’s office in early 1963. They also met at Bobby’s home in McLean, Virginia.” like Hernandez, Artime’s CIA case officer, Howard Hunt, received reports of Artime’s “lunches at Hickory Hill [RFK’s home].”
On April 2, 1963, Artime hand-delivered to Bobby Kennedy a message from Nicaraguan leader Luis Somoza. Its contents are unknown, but can be reasonably surmised by what soon happened. After he made the delivery, according to Artime’s report to the CIA, Bobby told Artime “to come and see him when he had a specific plan of action.” Artime further noted that Bobby had rented homes for Brigade leaders Roberto and Pepe San Roman on Chain Bridge Road (also Bobby’s street) in McLean, VA.15
Cuban Coordinating Committee member Al Haig wrote that, like all those not considered Kennedy “loyalists,” he was excluded from the secret planning sessions that took place in Bobby Kennedy’s office.16 One of those who did participate in the CCC’s closed-door meetings was Harry Williams. “We had at least three or four big meetings at Bobby’s office with leaders of the Brigade and [Cyrus] Vance and two or three others,” Williams remembers. “Joe Califano, who was working with McNamara, was there too.”17 Knowing the bind he was in as a result of the restrictive missile crisis resolution, Bobby and his cadre decided that all domestic activity be focused towards tunneling arms to training camps located outside the U.S. borders. It was at these meetings, also attended by Artime, that Robert Kennedy approved exile training camps in Latin America. “The general outline of the camps emerged from the meetings with Bobby,” Hernandez recently recalled. The training and invasion operation was christened the “Second Naval Guerrilla.”
According to Artime, Bobby Kennedy told him that if a Central American country played host to the invasion force, the liberators could technically avoid violating the chief provision of the missile crisis agreement: no raids against Cuba could be launched from within the United States. If Artime could negotiate the deal outside American borders, Bobby would see to it that the money flowed.18 Artime’s aide, Nilo Messer, explains, “Manolo had already spoken to Bobby Kennedy. And he told Artime that if military camps outside of the U.S., where American laws would not be broken, could be acquired, Kennedy would then promise to provide help.”19
It wasn’t long before Artime had negotiated agreements to use land in Guatemala, at Monkey Point in Nicaragua, and on the property of Colonel Vico Jimenez in Costa Rica to train for the upcoming invasion. “All those camps in Nicaragua were the result of Artime’s meetings with Bobby Kennedy,” remembers Manuel Hernandez.20 A future Congressional interview with Artime summarized:
He [Artime] stated he had direct contact with both President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and, through them, was given full support by the CIA for his anti-Castro operations. He said he felt the death of President Kennedy marked the end of the U.S. government’s attempts to liberate Cuba.21
Al Haig, the CCC coordinator excluded from RFK’s secret pow-wows, later learned another important detail of what he had missed. “Under the personal leadership of Robert Kennedy,” Haig later wrote, “at least eight efforts were made to eliminate Castro himself.”22 Artime later told Congressional investigators that “the plan was to eliminate Castro by taking over the Caco Peninsula while Castro was visiting, isolating him from the rest of his government.”23
While all these plans were being developed and decided on, Cuban exiles left out of the RFK loop were demanding some answers. Shortly after the initial Kennedy-exile lunches at Hickory Hill, a group of Cubans in Miami wrote Bobby, sarcastically noting how Artime and his “cronies” recently “visited the offices of Robert Kennedy,. . . over a modest lunch of sandwiches, soup and pie.” The letter-writers (Miami’s Cuban Information Service, or CIS), made it clear that the Kennedy liaison with the chosen exiles left the rest of the Brigade members “seething with indignation.”24 The CIS, unaware of the elaborate plans being hatched, still believed the Kennedys to be traitors to the exile cause as a result of their betrayal at the Bay of Pigs.
Bobby Kennedy delivered on his promised financial support for the exiles. Artime was placed on a $l,500-a-month retainer, and allocated $225,000 a month to launch the Second Naval Guerrilla.25 The CIA estimated the total sum allocated to Artime eventually came to $4,933,293.00.26 The exiles put the figure closer to $9 million.27 The funds were routed from Canada to banks in Switzerland, then to Costa Rican and Nicaraguan front companies.28 The materials bought with the funds included two mother ships, eight small vessels, two speed boats, three planes, eighty tons of weapons, and $250,000 worth of electrical equipment.29 Though most of the exile training was taking place in Central American nations, some of Artime’s commandos were also trained on the CIA’s “Farm” in Camp Peary, Virginia.
“Bobby Kennedy was the creator of this operation,” Artime’s Deputy, Raphael Quintero, recently recalled. “It was much like Oliver North’s operation—autonomous of the CIA, and run by the White House.30 This operation was what [future CIA Director] Bill Casey later called a ‘self-standing operation.’ The CIA didn’t want it that way. Bob Kennedy, it seems, was pushing the CIA and making them do it.”31
Miami CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley agrees: “The training camps in Central America were funded by Washington.”32 Army Intelligence documents sent to Bobby Kennedy’s Cuban Coordinating Committee, released in 1998, noted, “Shackley has not been given responsibility for the autonomous operations springing from Central America and he is personally skeptical about these operations. Shackley is a very knowledgeable and professional individual.”33 Shackley’s biographer, David Corn, wrote, “To Ted Shackley. . . the Artime sideshow represented the indulgence of Bobby Kennedy.”34
The facts that have emerged support Shackley’s statement that the exiles’ funding originated in Washington. Helping coordinate the CIA’s Cuba Desk back at the Agency’s Langley headquarters, Sam Halpern knew more than Shackley about where the re-invasion money was coming from, and on whose orders. “We provided the dough,” says Halpern. “Bobby [Kennedy] knew everything we were doing. We were doing it under his orders. The Cubans got all the money they needed.”35
Like many other young Cuban students, Raphael Quintero initially supported the revolutionary Fidel, only to leave Cuba in November 1959, at age twenty, after detecting Castro’s turn toward dictatorship. Joining the exile Brigade forces, Quintero was one of the few to infiltrate Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion. As a student friend in the Cuban Agrarian Reform movement, Quintero spent the ye
ars with Artime, gaining a bird’s-eye view of the Artime/RFK relationship. Quintero himself was brought to Washington twice to meet with Bobby Kennedy. At a 1996 Bay of Pigs seminar, Quintero described the atmosphere:
I had the luck to become a good friend of Bob Kennedy. . . I was involved in the operation with Artime in Central America. . . Bob Kennedy was obsessed. . . He had to get even with Castro. . . He mentioned this often to me and was very clear about it He was not going to try to eliminate Castro because he was an ideological guy. . . He was going to do it because the Kennedy name had been humiliated. . . He mentioned it clearly to me one day—we went to the circus together and he mentioned it to me.36
On June 22nd, three days after JFK had authorized “autonomous operations” against Cuba, Bobby met with Harry Williams, Erneido Oliva, and Roberto San Román, telling them “what a good job Artime is doing,” adding that their operations were anything but “autonomous.” “Don’t worry. All [your] forces, though outside the country, will be coordinated,” Bobby advised. “Don’t get the idea you will be working independently.” In an attempt to cover his tracks, as well as those of the U.S. government, he asked that the group stop making personal calls to him “because of the frequency of rumors linking him with certain operations against Cuba.”37 However, three weeks hence, a State Department memo stated, “We support Artime’s plans for sabotage and resistance against Cuba.”38
Simultaneously, on July 19, RFK’s closest exile ally, Harry Williams, traveled to Nicaragua to formally tell Artime something he already knew: “You are now being supported by the offices of GPIDEAL [President Kennedy].”39
Soon, Artime and Quintero journeyed to Fort Benning, Georgia to recruit leaders for the new operation. Fellow exile and CIA agent Felix Rodriguez was, at the time, part of Ft. Benning’s Cuban Officer Training Program, which assimilated former Brigade members into the U.S. military. Long a friend of both Artime and Quintero, Rodriguez recalls Artime’s first words: “We’re going to overthrow Castro—this time we’re really going to do it.” Artime added that “the President himself was sponsoring the liberation movement” and the operation was being overseen by Robert Kennedy.
Before he would leave his Ft. Benning post, Rodriguez wisely demanded to see proof that the U.S. government had approved the Second Naval Guerrilla. “What assurance do you need?” Artime asked. Rodriguez suggested that they provide him special communications training at Fort Benning, right under the nose of the U.S. Army. “If that’s what you want, OK,” replied Artime. Shortly thereafter, two men showed up at the Army fort, and trained a suitably impressed Rodriguez and two others in how to clandestinely communicate during the Central American operation. “That [training] convinced me that Artime was planning a bona fide U.S. government-sponsored operation,” says Rodriguez, “and I took steps to resign my commission.” In November 1963, Rodriguez moved to Nicaragua.40
Artime accurately summed up the enterprise just before his death from cancer in 1977: “I was protected by Bob until his brother was assassinated. He met with me personally in the offices of the Attorney General. He kept in touch with the entire operation.”41
All this Kennedy-Cuban intimacy did not sit well with those in charge of the CIA’s official Cuba Project—an operation that was accustomed to not only running professional espionage operations, but to simultaneously providing deniability for the White House. A CIA memo added that “personnel at JM/WAVE possessed certain ill feelings towards Artime’s operation,” because, according to author David Corn, “it could do what JM/WAVE was no longer permitted to do: conduct sabotage.”42
The CIA’s JM/WAVE station chief, Ted Shackley, was particularly vexed. Artime’s CIA liaison to JM/WAVE, Tom Clines, remembered Shackley’s reaction. “He couldn’t stand it,” said Clines. “He hated the idea that the Cubans had gotten to the Kennedys and convinced them that they could operate on their own.”43
Shackley worried that the Kennedys’ closeness to the exiles’ actions could later be used against the White House. Once, when Shackley sent a Cuban confidante of Bobby on a raid of the island, the agent was captured and tortured. Shackley feared that Bobby’s name would surface—just the kind of thing the CIA was supposed to prevent.44
At times, the exiles’ coziness with the Kennedys was downright embarrassing to the CIA professionals. According to Corn, “When Clines in Miami had trouble requisitioning a boat for a mission, his Cubans crowded a pay phone and rang the President’s brother. ‘We got the boat,’ Clines recalled, ‘and [Station Chief Ted] Shackley was pissed at me.’”45 Cuba Project Executive Officer Sam Halpern recently recalled, “It was insanity. If the exiles didn’t like what their [CIA] case officers told them, they’d just pick up the phone and call Bobby. Nobody knew who was running the thing!”46
One of the few CIA officers who willingly participated in the Second Naval Guerrilla scheme was the Kennedys’ close friend Des FitzGerald. On August 9, 1963, Des wrote to JFK’s National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy to discuss what he called “the Somoza Plan.” In the memo, FitzGerald worried that Nicaraguan head Somoza would be able to “keep out of the limelight of public curiosity a project which is essentially designed to rebuild an indigenous resistance movement inside Cuba.”
The CIA officer further noted Somoza’s concern that Cuba might retaliate against his country if sabotage raids were traced to Nicaragua. He therefore recommended that those components be shifted to Costa Rica, while the Nicaraguan forces concentrated on fomenting the internal Cuban revolt. FitzGerald also pointed out that Artime’s operation, unlike other exile schemes, at least had a chance of succeeding.
Lastly, FitzGerald reported Somoza’s statement that he had received the following assurances:
/A./ The ‘green light’ to run anti-Castro raids and resistance operations [was] obtained in Washington discussions with President Kennedy and the Attorney General. /B./ [Artime was] asked by President Kennedy and the Attorney General to take four Brigade leaders to Nicaragua. /C./ [Artime was] appointed by President Kennedy to represent him in dealings with the five Central American presidents who are interested in overthrowing Castro.47
Rolando Cubela Secades
Manuel Artime testified not only to his direct contact with Bobby, but also with the President. According to Artime, it was the President who suggested, perhaps as a result of Harry Williams’ suggestion to Bobby eight months earlier, the coup de grace for the Second Naval Guerrilla: an Artime associate, Rolando Cubela Secades, should be enlisted to kill Castro.48
Rolando Cubela was a natural choice for the role of Castro’s future assassin. A doctor and former student guerrilla leader in Cuba, Cubela was an experienced assassin, having murdered Batista’s chief of military intelligence, Lt. Col. Antonio Rico. Cubela cut down Rico in a hail of bullets as he exited a Havana nightclub in 1956. After the murder, Cubela and his co-conspirator, Guillermo Riestra, escaped in a small boat to Tampa, Florida. From there, they were believed to have made their way to New Orleans.49
Cubela was thus considered a hero by Batista’s enemy, Fidel Castro. As such, Cubela was given a high post in the Castro government, becoming a confidante of the new dictator, with direct access to “el lider maximo.” Later, when Castro embraced Marxism, Cubela felt personally betrayed by the revolution.
As early as 1961, Cubela began making clandestine contacts with CIA agents. He recalls meeting a CIA officer in the Hilton Hotel in Mexico City. “This [CIA] officer, according to what he informed me, had the responsibility of infiltrating communism in the Caribbean area,” Cubela recalls.50 Over the next two years, the CIA would continue to meet with Cubela, now code-named AM/LASH. Cubela had expressed a desire to defect to the U.S., but his CIA case officers were instructed to keep him in Cuba, where he would “stay in place and report to us.”51 At the same time, Cubela also met with Artime and Quintero.
On September 3, 1963, Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance, Bobby Kennedy’s Army representative on the CCC, wrote a memo listing various options
available to the administration in dealing with Cuba. The list included, “Bribing, embarrassing, blackmailing, assassinating, coercing and kidnapping leaders.”52 Four days later, a CIA agent in Porto Allegre, Brazil spoke with Cubela, at which time Castro’s “confidante” said he was now prepared to attempt an “inside job.”53 Raphael Quintero remembers that the plan was to unfold on July 26, 1964, the anniversary of the start of Castro’s own ascension to power. “Sixty men were to embark simultaneously, after Cubela had killed Castro. They were to take out the entire cabinet. Cubela had given us the impression that he had enough support in the military.”54
This gambit was part of an elaborate, long-planned, super-secret effort to retake the island before the 1964 presidential election. In actuality, Artime’s troop activity and Cubela’s murder attempt were but two parts of a full-blown U.S. invasion known as OPLAN 380-63.
OPLAN 380-63: The Kennedys Plan an Invasion
“We never stopped going after Fidel. In fact, the pressure from the Kennedys became worse after the missile crisis.”
—Sam Halpern, CIA executive Assistant to Cuba Desk directors Desmond FitzGerald and William Harvey55