Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  She went on to call Kennedy “degenerate, unfortunate, an aggressor.” Calderon then phoned another Embassy employee named Nico to pass on the good news. Again, both parties laughed, then Nico said, “Okay. What time will the plane arrive?” Calderon replied: “At 4, and at 4:30 they must be at the airport.”69 (This “airport” conversation will take on added significance after the assassination. See Chapter 14.) The CIA, in reviewing its assassination file in 1975, concluded that, in hindsight, Calderon “could very well have known something that would make what she said less a matter of boastful self-indulgence than was assumed at the time.”70

  HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey wrote, “We decided the [Calderon] allegations raised suspicions of the most sinister sort.”71 As part of its investigation, the Committee traveled to Havana to conduct interviews with, among others, Fidel Castro and Luisa Calderon. In the interim, the HSCA obtained a CIA memo verifying that all three of Oswald’s alleged Cuban contacts in Mexico City were indeed in the employ of the DGI (Cuban Intelligence).72 The HSCA interview of Fidel Castro took place, but permission to interview Calderon was refused because of “illness.”

  The HSCA wisely concluded that Castro intelligence operatives, by the fall of 1963, had penetrated the Kennedys’ assassination plots, including that of Rolando Cubela Secades (AM/LASH). HSCA Counsel Robert Blakey later wrote:

  The HSCA was uneasy about the timing of the unmasking of Cubela and the allegations about Calderon. . . [We were] inclined to believe that Oswald had uttered the threat attributed to him in the Cuban consulate. . . Therefore we believe that the Cuban government withheld important information. . . We also believe that the Cuban government kept a careful eye fixed on its own best interests. Here that interest—as the Cubans saw it—warranted not telling us the truth.73

  Further Allegations

  The HSCA unearthed another alleged Oswald/Havana link from a Cuban named Autilio Ramirez Ortiz. Ortiz, who hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1961, was ostensibly sentenced to a prison term in Cuba. In actuality, he was given a job at an intelligence facility. While there, he entered the G-2 (Cuban Military Intelligence) file room and attempted to locate the file on him in order to learn why he had been refused a visa. As he was searching, he noticed directly behind the Ortiz file a file labeled “Oswaldo-Kennedy.” It contained a passport photo of Oswald, with a KGB notation:

  This individual was recommended to us through the Cuban G-2. Oswald is an eternal adventurer. We have instructions to communicate with him through our embassy in Mexico. If this individual is to be utilized it has to be very careful.”74

  It is not clear how the HSCA evaluated the Ortiz testimony, but apparently he told the story consistently for many years. John Martino, who worked for the Mafia-owned casinos in Havana, and was subsequently imprisoned in Havana during the early 1960’s, had long claimed that Oswald was working for the Cubans. Curiously, when asked how he knew this, he said he learned it from a Cuban named “Ortiz.”75

  The “Oswaldo/Kennedy” file story recalls the allegations of Dr. Herminio Portell-Villa, a professor of history at the University of Havana before leaving the country with other exiles in 1960, after the revolution. Villa told the FBI that via reliable sources inside Cuba, he had learned of another file sent from Moscow to “the Castro brothers” in Havana two days after the assassination. The notation on the file read:

  File of Oswald with Concheso (Cuban Embassy in Moscow) from files of MARIN HERRERA (Ministry of Foreign Relations, Havana), today handed to the CASTRO brothers.76

  According to Portell-Villa, the file documented that Oswald, during his stay in the Soviet Union, had made contact with Cuba’s Ambassadors in Moscow, Faure Chomon and Carlos Olivares. This confirms a rumor reported in the usually unreliable Police Gazette in June 1967. The paper stated:

  What is not generally known is that in Minsk at the time [Oswald was there] were several hundred Cuban students sent by the Castro regime to Russia for training in schools there. Oswald became friendly with one key man in the student group—a man known to have been an intelligence officer for Castro.”

  Not long after the assassination, the FBI and the Secret Service briefly investigated a story making the rounds on Miami streets: While in Mexico City, Oswald was put in contact with Quinton Pino Machado, a known strongarm in Castro’s Diplomatic Service. Castro had previously appointed him Cuban Ambassador to Nicaragua, where he was subsequently declared persona non grata for teaching Nicaraguan youth groups how to carry out sabotage. After his expulsion, Pino was sent by Castro to Mexico City, where he was assigned to investigate activities directed against the Castro regime. Allegedly, Pino cut a deal whereby Oswald would be taken to Cuba after the assassination. Pino himself crossed the border from Mexico into Texas for the purpose of escorting Oswald back to Havana. However, according to a Secret Service informant, “the plan went awry because Oswald had not been wearing clothing of a prearranged color and because of the shooting of Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippit.” Pino returned to Havana.77 Fifteen years later, when reviewing the official investigation into the President’s death, a Congressional Committee would state, “The Committee could find no record of follow-up action [on the Machado reports].”78

  That Cuban hit men were able to slip through the Mexican-U.S. border is not an entirely new story. Eight months before the events of Mexico City, the Boston Record-American newspaper, citing two sources, reported that two Cubans, “said to have been especially trained,” entered the U.S. from Mexico with the intent of killing Richard Cardinal Cushing, a longtime friend of the Kennedy family. The Boston Globe said it had received similar information. Cardinal Cushing declined a Boston police offer of a 24-hour guard, and was not harmed. Earlier in the year, similar threats had been made against the Kennedy children by Cubans entering the country through Mexico.79

  Simultaneous with the Cuban threat to the Kennedy family, distinguished UPI reporter Edward McCarthy was informed by UPI national news editor Bill Sexton that New York cops had recently picked up reports of Cubans planning to assassinate JFK. Assigned to the story because of his great sources in the federal government, McCarthy immediately checked with Peter Esperdy, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York. What Esperdy confirmed to McCarthy points out not only the pro-Castro threat to Kennedy, but also the use of Mexico as a conduit for the treachery:

  We know from more than one quarter that Fidel has sent four hit teams of assassins—three to four men to a group—into the United States. The killers illegally entered our country through Mexico with orders to go underground in Cuban or Hispanic-dominated communities such as those in south Florida, New Jersey, and elsewhere, even Brooklyn, and then, at the right moment, they are to go into action and murder the president.80

  Stressing the sensitivity and seriousness of the threat, Esperdy implored McCarthy to sit on the story, lest the Cubans involved go deeper underground. McCarthy assented and would not divulge the information until he wrote his autobiography 35 years later.

  By early October 1963, the CIA had determined that one of the persons it had monitored darting between the Cuban and Soviet embassies was a former American defector to Russia named Lee Harvey Oswald. But for reasons that may be a combination of colossal ineptitude and a compulsive need to protect its “sources and methods,” virtually nothing was done about it. Although the CIA knew that Oswald met with the KGB’s Valery Kostikov, believed to be involved in “wet operations” (assassinations), the Agency felt it was unnecessary to so inform the FBI or the Secret Service.81

  In the aftermath of the assassination, the CIA has maintained an impenetrable silence when it comes to details of how many double agents it had on the inside of the Cuban Embassy, although it is agreed by all parties that it had them. Additionally acknowledged is that the Cuban Embassy was electronically bugged, phone-tapped, and photo-surveilled.

  Because it knew that the Calderon document had been placed in Oswald’s file before the assassination, and because of the
testimony of numerous Mexico City “assets,” the HSCA would later state that it disbelieved the CIA’s official stance that it was ignorant of Oswald’s visit. The HSCA thus concluded:

  The Agency maintained that prior to the assassination, its field sources had not actually linked Oswald [to] the person who visited the Cuban consulate in October 1963. Testimony obtained directly from these sources, however, established that this connection had in fact been made in early October, 1963.82

  It is not difficult to speculate about the myriad of problems in store for the CIA if it made a complete disclosure of the Cuban Embassy affair. Chief among these difficulties:

  The CIA would have to give up years of hard work establishing “assets” (like Proenza and Duran) in the Cuban Embassy (arguably the most critical CIA operation in the Western Hemisphere). This would have been unthinkable, considering the Kennedys’ preoccupation with Cuba, the imminent commencement of OPLAN 380-63, and the position Mexico City held as a center of espionage.

  The disclosure of photos and tapes would give away valuable sources of future infiltration and intelligence.

  The disclosure of CIA agents in the Cuban Embassy could very well show them to have been in contact with President Kennedys assassin—a guaranteed fatal blow for the beleaguered CIA. Perhaps these agents were even photographed with Oswald.

  Most damaging would be the possibility that the CIA was contemporaneously aware of just who Lee Oswald was—a psychopath who had defected to Russia—and that, though it was fully informed of his threat/offer to kill Kennedy, did nothing. At a recent Bahamian conference attended by former Cuban intelligence personnel, more evidence surfaced that the CIA may have heard Oswald’s threat at the time he made it. Arturo Rodriguez, a former security officer at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, described the atmosphere at the consulate after the assassination. According to Rodriguez, security personnel “tore the place apart” searching for “bugging” microphones. What they turned up astonished them: microphones believed to be American were found in the arms of chairs, window frames, light fixtures, and elsewhere. Some of the bugs could be remotely turned on and off. Others appeared to be permanently “open.” If those monitoring the Cuban Embassy didn’t take the Oswald threat seriously at the time, one can only imagine their horror when they heard the news a month later that Oswald had indeed killed the President Those in a position to know thus held the power to both destroy the CIA and possibly to start a nuclear confrontation between the world’s two superpowers.

  When David Phillips was asked to characterize the CIA’s performance in the Mexico City affair, he replied with possibly the most profound understatement in the entire Kennedy assassination oeuvre: “At the very best, it [was] not professional.”83

  At 8:30 a.m. on October 2nd, 1963, Lee Oswald left behind the labyrinthine intrigue of Mexico City, boarding a bus bound for Texas. He crossed the border at Laredo at 1:30 a.m. the next day, and arrived in Dallas at 2:30 p.m. on October 3rd. It was the last long-distance trip in the much-traveled life of the twenty-three year-old.

  On the same day, back in Washington, Bobby Kennedy’s Special Group Augmented (SGA) met and approved nine operations in Cuba, several of which included sabotage.84

  In Miami, Cuban exile businessman Jose Aleman, considered a reliable source by the FBI, informed the Bureau that three Cuban agents had recently appeared in Miami, and then proceeded to Texas. “I advised the FBI in long conversations that I thought something was going to happen,” Aleman later testified. “I was telling them to be careful.”85

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TWO TRACKS TO OBLIVION

  “Cuba is Kennedy’s bone in the throat.”

  —Nikita Khrushchev, Chairman of the Soviet Communist Party in 1963

  By the fall of 1963, Cuba had become the sine qua non of the Kennedy administration. After the president’s numerous foreign policy disasters—the defeat at the Bay of Pigs, his weak performance at the Vienna Summit with Khruschev, and the embarassing erection of the Berlin Wall in Germany— JFK knew that his prospects for re-election in 1964 would be greatly enhanced by a resolution of “the Cuba problem.” If Kennedy couldn’t control Cuba, ninety miles away, why would the country entrust to him the simmering quagmire of Laos and Vietnam? And, if that weren’t bad enough, polls showed the president’s other political weakness: by 4 to 1 margins, Kennedy was “pushing [civil rights-related] integration too fast.”

  With each new poll, the possibility of a Kennedy mandate in 1964 dwindled. From a high of 82 percent approval rating after the Missile Crisis, the president’s popularity had plummeted to 55 percent—a staggering 27 point decline.1 Furthermore, if a Republican other than Senator Barry Goldwater was nominated, Kennedy feared he could lose altogether. (Goldwater was considered a soft opponent, easily portrayed as trigger-happy and kooky.) Governor David Lawrence of Pennsylvania had said that the President confided to him his fears of defeat. James Reston of the New York Times wrote about “doubt and disappointment” among the voters, adding, “People don’t quite believe in him [the president].”

  Particularly worrisome for the Kennedy camp were the recent attacks of a GOP presidential hopeful, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller had been hitting Kennedy hard on the Cuban issue, calling it Kennedy’s “Achilles’ heel.” He accused JFK of allowing the Soviets to maintain a secret force in Cuba after the Missile Crisis resolution. “This will raise hell as it increasingly comes out,” Rockefeller remarked at the time. According to Kennedy aide Roswell Gilpatrick, Kennedy was obsessed with Rockefeller’s attacks.2

  Although the polls predicted a slim Kennedy victory against the likely Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, Kennedy needed a heftier margin, and maybe a landslide, in 1964 to build political capital with Congress. Such a mandate would allow him to accomplish the lofty goals he had set for himself. Only strong public confidence would allow him to increase or decrease U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.3

  Kennedy’s civil rights stance was more than a little troublesome. JFK was viewed in the South as a federal meddler from the North; his political support in the South was virtually non-existent. His only chances for victory in “the Bible belt” were, it was said, in Texas and Florida. To win Florida, he would have to appeal to the Cuban exile community, then politically dominant in Dade County.4 In Texas, Kennedy’s problems revolved around fallout from the “Peace Speech.” He was now seen by many Texans as “soft on Communism.” When Kennedy arrived in Houston the day before the assassination, he would observe a streamer towed by a biplane which read: “COEXISTENCE IS SURRENDER.”

  Indeed, to many, nothing was more dangerous than the president’s overture to “the Reds.” Ted Dealey, the Kennedy-bashing publisher of the Dallas Morning News, believed that Kennedy had endangered America with his displays of gullibility and weakness. Less than two years earlier, in the autumn of 1961, Dealey was among a group of Texas publishers invited to a White House luncheon. Startling his fellow guests with a prepared diatribe, he attacked his host with a slashing statement, first about attempts (such as that luncheon’s) to “soft soap” others to the president’s side, then about his larger failure.

  The publisher fumed, “You and your administration are weak sisters. . . We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government.” The nation, Dealey asserted, needed a “man on horseback” to lead it, “and many people in Texas and the southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s [Kennedy’s daughter’s] tricycle.”

  Politically, Kennedy wasn’t faring much better in the North. His rollback of steel prices, and his desire to deprive the oil industry of its lucrative 27 percent oil depletion allowance, had alarmed big business. In his first 30 months as President, Kennedy’s domestic initiatives remained largely bogged down in Congress. Some wondered whether Kennedy was simply a pampered, ineffectual scion—and doubted that he was the reformer he professed to be. Others saw him even less charitably, as just an opportunistic son of a latter-da
y robber baron, installed to do his father’s bidding.

  The polls revealed that both North and South agreed on one point: everyone had Cuba on their mind. A recent book by Montague Kern superbly described Kennedy’s dilemma:

  The administration was acutely aware of the Cuban issue and kept track through polls ever since the Bay of Pigs in the knowledge that Cuba was, in Theodore Sorenson’s apt phrase, President Kennedy’s “Achilles’ heel.” The polls that the administration solicited and picked up from newspapers showed the same thing: a public acutely aware of Cuba and eager for the government to “do something” about it [Pollster] Louis Harris, who studied attitudes on the Cuban issue in Florida for the administration in December 1961, concluded that “the vast bulk of public opinion favors doing everything possible short of armed intervention.”5

  A poll clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle and sent to Sorenson in early 1962 indicated that on Cuba, alone among foreign policy issues, the administration received a 62 percent negative rating. By September 1962, many Americans clearly were in an angry mood: A Gallup poll of September 18 reported that 71 percent of those having opinions wanted action against Cuba, and that many respondents used words like “bomb,” “invade,” or “starve them out”. . . [In the 1962 elections,] Cuba became the Republicans’ number one campaign issue. . . The initiative belonged not to the president, but to the Republicans and the Cuban exiles.6