by Gus Russo
FitzGerald readily admitted in 1967 that he told Cubela of Bobby Kennedy’s imprimatur on the plan. Cubela himself recalled:
He [FitzGerald] offered me on behalf of the U.S. government the support, the political support of the United States. . . [This support was] for being able to carry out either the plot attempt against the Prime Minister of Cuba or any other activity that will put in danger the stability of the regime.35
Cubela’s version is corroborated by Sanchez/Sanson, who acted as the translator. He later testified, “FitzGerald gave assurances that the United States not only would support the government which emerged after a successful coup, but also gave assurances that the United States would help in bringing about that coup.”36
FitzGerald later claimed that he didn’t actually speak with Kennedy about this matter. Instead, he told CIA investigators that he and Richard Helms together decided “it was not necessary to seek approval from Robert Kennedy for FitzGerald to speak in his name.” Helms, however, recalled no such conversation with FitzGerald. Further, Helms (and other believers in “plausible denial”—the concept that political leaders are shielded from responsibility for their actions) have always contended that they would never undertake anything as serious as an assassination of a foreign leader without the White House’s approval.
In later years, some CIA officials claimed that there was a misunderstanding on Cubela’s part—that he was not authorized to kill Castro, only to antagonize him. FitzGerald’s assistant, Sam Halpern, recently refuted that assertion unhesitatingly, “My boss at the time, FitzGerald, decided that we would give Cubela something to use to, if possible, assassinate Castro.”37 FitzGerald’s Cuba specialist on his Special Affairs Staff (SAS) agreed when he testified, “The AM/LASH operation, at all times during its existence, was characterized by senior SAS officers, including Helms and FitzGerald, as an assassination plot sponsored by the CIA.”38 It should be noted that Helms later finessed the subject when testifying that AM/LASH was not an assassin per se, but a “political action agent” who might coincidentally murder Castro.39
Three weeks after the Paris meeting of October 29, the CIA equipped Cubela with a poison pen device designed for use on Castro.40
In 1975, Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania chaired a subcommittee looking into just this question: How much did RFK know about Cubela’s assassination plot? Because Robert Kennedy’s and Des FitzGerald’s deaths precluded their testifying, the official Senate report concluded that it was impossible to determine the depth of Robert Kennedy’s knowledge of the AM/LASH operation. However, by 1994, Richard Schweiker was ready to divulge more than the Committee’s 1976 report.
“I was told in executive session by a high-ranking CIA official that, in fact, Des FitzGerald was acting on behalf of Bobby Kennedy,” Schweiker admits. “We had a witness confirm it. It was either Helms or one of his associates. I’m fairly certain it was Helms.”41 When questioned if he would like to go further now that time had passed, Helms recently told the author, “The Church Committee went into it as far as I’m willing to go.”42 (One is left with the inference that there is more to go into.) It would later be learned that Helms had no such reservations when he spoke to his friend Henry Kissinger, then serving as President Gerald Ford’s National Security Advisor (details to follow).
Senator Schweiker’s recollections are buttressed by the statements of a high CIA official who worked closely with FitzGerald and AM/LASH. Speaking with the author in 1995 on conditions of anonymity, the officer pulled no punches. “The Kennedys were trying to play every kind of card in the deck,” the officer recalled. “The CIA was definitely not operating as a rogue elephant. The idea that Des was operating on his own is a bunch of rubbish. The Kennedys knew everything.”43 Another agency official who worked closely with FitzGerald on the Cuba Task Force, as well as AM/LASH, summarized the situation for the author. “One thing is certain: Des was no ‘rogue.’ He was a true professional. The Kennedys were aware of all operations, including AM/LASH.”44 Bobby’s CCC staffer General Alexander Haig agrees. “No question but that Bobby knew of the plots. It was John Kennedy and Bobby, not the CIA.”45
The Mafia: Continuing Plots
As if all this activity were not enough, the Kennedy administration continued its contacts with the criminal underworld, as it had years earlier with the likes of Norman Rothman, Johnny Rosselli, and Sam Giancana, and sometimes with the assistance of the CIA’s Charlie Ford.
Although many of the Kennedys’ contacts with organized crime were terminated during the “crackdown” on Cuban exiles, Johnny Rosselli has testified that he was never told to end his Mafia-based Castro assassination project, which continued on a track parallel to the AM/LASH plot. Documents released in 1994 show that, in official testimony, Rosselli recalled meeting some of his fellow Cuban plotters in Washington in 1963. Rosselli told a congressional committee that he would reveal the name of only one of the Cubans, because he was dead: Castro’s first Prime Minister and Brigade leader Dr. Jose Miro Cardona (Miro). Although he would not reveal the other name, Rosselli made it clear that both men had been involved in the Phase One assassination attempts that allegedly had been terminated two years earlier.46
“They [the Cubans] said they were there meeting with the Attorney General [in Washington], and that they were waiting for an appointment to the White House,” Rosselli recalled.
A Miro meeting with RFK would not be surprising. Miro was the president of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the same group run out of 544 Camp Street in New Orleans by Robert Kennedy confidante Sergio Arcacha Smith. Miro also was one of the participants in the secret meeting with Senator John Kennedy in July 1960. He later attended private White House meetings with JFK, after one of which Miro announced that he and the President “had formalized a pact which called for a new invasion.”47
By the late spring of 1963, Miro fell victim to the exile “crackdown,” resulting in a much-publicized split with the Kennedy administration. Kennedy aide/protector Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. advised the President in writing that his comments on Miro should be “restrained” lest the CRC leader be “goaded into giving away Kennedy’s most secret operations with the exiles.” Schlesinger added:
Miro has not told all he knows, and if driven into a comer, could do us a lot more damage. . . If goaded, Miro could give a hopelessly squalid picture of our covert dealings with the exiles.48
But, even without Miro, the plots by select Kennedy loyalists in both the exile community and within organized crime continued after the crackdown. The bottom line, according to Rosselli, was that “there was never a time a halt [on the assassination plot] was called.”49 He would later tell journalist Jack Anderson that he sent three sharpshooters into Havana in March 1963. This time, like all the previous attempts, Castro was forewarned—his troops were waiting to arrest the men upon their arrival. As Rosselli later recounted, the assassination team was “captured and tortured until they told all they knew about our operation, which they said was ordered by the White House.”50
By this time, Bill Harvey had been removed from the Rosselli assassination project, and sent packing to the CIA station in Rome. However, the Kennedys had their own network in place with numerous direct links to Rosselli with which they could keep the plots alive. First, Rosselli was a close friend of JFK’s lover Judy Campbell. Second, the Kennedy family had a historic relationship with Rosselli’s close associate, Sam Giancana, who had assisted Papa Joe Kennedy in Jack’s 1960 electoral effort. Third, Rosselli was a close friend of JFK/RFK lover, Marilyn Monroe.51
Fourth, the man who originally enlisted Rosselli’s help in the plots, Robert Maheu, shared his private investigating office with the Kennedy family investigator, Carmine Bellino. Bellino, who started with the Kennedys as RFK’s investigator on the McClellan Investigating Committee on Labor Racketeering in the late 1950’s, was often referred to as the “Kennedy family spook.” Investigative journalist Jim Hougan accurately described Bellino as a “zero-c
ool, behind-the-scenes figure in the Kennedy organization.”52
The Open Secret
“The AM/LASH plot was known to Castro. We believed Cubela was a double agent.”
—Grayston Lynch, CIA agent in Florida53
“Among the things [the Cuban exiles] said—undoubtedly reported to Castro by the Cuban Intelligence service, which had penetrated the emigré community—was talk of plans against Castro himself. . . The fact must be accepted that such information was reported to him.”
—Scott Breckinridge, CIA Deputy Inspector General54
Not the least of the Kennedys’ problems was the fact that Castro’s extensive intelligence apparatus had made inroads into every component of the U.S. Cuban operations. The dictator had already demonstrated that he was aware of U.S.-sponsored terrorism. He had penetrated the Central American training sites for the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Guantanamo-based assassination plots, and the New Orleans training camps. According to Al Tarabochia, of Florida’s Dade County sheriff’s intelligence unit, “The exile community was penetrated to the fullest degree.”55
Castro was also aware of Artime’s Central American camps, if only by his partisans’ monitoring of the Miami newspapers. On July 14, 1963, not long after Artime had solidified the RFK/Somoza deal, reporter Hal Hendrix wrote an article in the Miami News. The piece, entitled “Backstage With Bobby,” noted Bobby’s “hip pocket plans with the exiles and Somoza” in mounting a new invasion.56
Fabian Escalante, Castro’s counterintelligence chief, disclosed in 1994, “We had several agents, not only there [in Miami], but also in other places.”57 However, as the CIA’s Miami Station Chief Ted Shackley remembers, “Castro didn’t need to have a lot of agents. The Cubans not only talked a great deal, but Castro monitored their phone calls and mail back to the island. He would have learned the most through these methods.”58
In May 1975, Fidel Castro sent South Dakota Senator George McGovern (the 1972 Democratic nominee for president) a list of operations the Cubans had penetrated. Twenty-four incidents were described, and the list did not profess to be all-inclusive. The sheer detail of Castro’s knowledge was stunning. The document included not only key names and dates, but the identities of the CIA case officers, operatives, sites of planning meetings, etc. McGovern stated, upon receiving the documents, “I have no way to verify these allegations. But if they are true, the CIA has engaged in the most shocking, murderous, and un-American behavior against the leaders of a neighboring state. I find such behavior a complete contradiction of the principles on which our nation was founded.”59
What McGovern didn’t say, or didn’t know, was that at least one, if not most, of the plots had been instigated by the Kennedys themselves, and not by the CIA. One of the twenty-four listed, complete with his assistants and backups, was “Rolando Cubela Secades”—known to Bobby Kennedy and Des FitzGerald as AM/LASH.
Details are beginning to emerge of just how the Cubans penetrated the AM/LASH plot. In 1992, the Chief of Cuban Counter-intelligence, Israel Behar, told BBC filmmakers:
We started to notice that Cubela attended different cabarets every evening— the Tropicana, the Capri. He spent all the time with the same group of people, chattering suspiciously. They used to drink to excess, and spent enormous amounts of money. We knew he was capable of doing it [an assassination] because he had already eliminated a torturer in the Batista regime. So we infiltrated his group and delayed the execution of the plan for longer than the Americans wanted. I knew of at least 26 CIA-backed assassination plots. But we penetrated them, again, and again, and again.60
In November 1993, Cuba released more details on how the AM/LASH operation was penetrated. In 1963, the man responsible for coordinating these penetrations was the Cuban head of counterintelligence, General Fabian Escalante. In the Brazilian-Cuban TV documentary ZR/RIFLE, which had Escalante’s assistance, a Cuban agent named Juan Felaifel gave his version of the story behind AM/LASH. Together with the released Cuban intelligence documents, the agent’s interview was powerful.
Felaifel says he was told of the AM/LASH plot by his brother, who was described as an intelligence chief planted in the exile organization of Bobby Kennedy intimate (and Cubela friend) Manuel Artime. Felaifel’s brother later helped Artime craft a silencer for the 7.62 FAL rifle which Cubela intended to use in an attempt on Castro.61 This attack was to take place from an apartment building located directly in front of the university where Castro often spoke. Obviously, this attempt was also thwarted.62
The AM/LASH operation was so insecure that between July 1962 and October 1963, street informants in Miami reported the CIA/Cubela contact to the FBI. One such report states that the “CIA is aware of subject’s reported plans.”63
At least two of FitzGerald’s associates were prescient enough to go on record against the FitzGerald-Cubela liaison. “Joseph Langosch” (pseudonym) was the Chief of Counterintelligence for the CIA’s Special Affairs Staff, which was responsible for coordinating the Cuban operations, as well as participating in Bobby Kennedy’s Cuban Coordinating Committee. Langosch suspected Cubela was a “dangle”—a double agent. He warned FitzGerald against meeting with Cubela, but FitzGerald ignored him. Langosch issued this assessment:
The AM/LASH operation might have been an insecure operation prior to the assassination of President Kennedy because it was highly possible that as of 1962, the Cuban intelligence services had knowledge of the CIA’s association with persons involved in the AM/LASH operation, including AM/LASH.64
Langosch later testified that he thought the operation was “nonsense” and “counterproductive” and that AM/LASH’s bona fides were subject to question. “I basically disagreed with the whole thrust of the AM/LASH operation,” recalled Langosch. “My disapproval of it was very strong. Des FitzGerald knew it. . . and preferred not to discuss it anymore with me.”65
Ted Shackley, Chief of the CIA’s JM/WAVE Station in Florida, also advised FitzGerald against meeting Cubela, but for different reasons. He later testified that “if anything went wrong, an individual as prominent in Washington both within the agency and in the social world in Washington [as FitzGerald] would be exposed in the press. That would create a flap that I thought was not worth what would be gained from the meeting.”66 Shackley told Des Fitzgerald that the only thing he’d get from such a dangerous meeting was “the satisfaction of saying you saw the guy. [But] Des shrugged and went on his way.”67
“The problem,” recalls FitzGerald’s executive assistant Sam Halpern, “was that Des had been photographed at Georgetown parties so often that his cover was blown.”68 As history records, however, FitzGerald made the October 29th appointment with Cubela. “It wasn’t the first time Des went on a gut feeling,” says Sam Halpern.69
Shackley’s suspicions about Cubela’s true loyalties persisted, however, and he is far from alone among CIA operatives and contacts in Florida (Grayston Lynch, for example) who were (and are) convinced that Cubela was reporting back to Fidel. They point to the fact that when Cubela was finally arrested by Castro’s police in March 1966, instead of being executed, he was given a jail term that Castro himself eventually commuted.
In a final sexual linkage, the CIA was aware that a one-time mistress of Cubela was believed to be working for Cuban intelligence, and her brother was definitely working for Cuban intelligence.70
Cubela in Doubt
Still other things about Cubela were, or should have been, worrisome for security reasons, including, notably, his alleged connections to organized crime. In the midst of the Kennedy “crackdown,” organized crime figures did not amicably view the American president. By late 1962, most members of organized crime had been cut out of the Kennedy sphere generally, and Kennedy’s Cuba Project in particular. They were in fact being hounded by Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, and feared that they would never do business again in Havana. Threats against the President were soon being overheard in underworld circles.
One oft-cited threat was voice
d in September 1962 by Florida underworld boss Santos Trafficante, Jr., who was dangerously close to Cubela. Trafficante had worked with Meyer Lansky in the Batista era as manager of Havana’s Sans Souci Casino. After the Castro takeover, Trafficante was imprisoned briefly by Castro before being allowed to leave for Florida. Soon, he was attending meetings with the CIA and Johnny Rosselli, where the early assassination plots against Castro were hatched. These plots were ignominious failures, and it has been the conclusion of many that Castro had inside information of their plans.71 Some believe Santos Trafficante might have been Castro’s “mole.”
In September 1962, an exile businessman named Jose Aleman, considered a highly reliable source by the FBI, approached Trafficante for a loan. The conversation turned to Robert Kennedy’s harassment of the mob. At this point, Trafficante told Aleman not to worry: “He is going to be hit.” Aleman’s story has been repeatedly interpreted by researchers to mean that the mob was going to kill President Kennedy.
That, however, may have been a serious misinterpretation. Aleman himself was convinced that Trafficante was tied to Cubela, and that both Cubela and Trafficante were agents of Fidel Castro. Given his connections to Castro, the possibility must be considered that Trafficante was aware of a different Kennedy assassination plot—one which involved Cuba, not JFK. Aleman would later testify that Cubela was among those who attempted to secure Trafficante’s release from a Cuban prison immediately after the revolution.72 Several members of Cuban counterintelligence have since corroborated Aleman’s suggestion that both were Castro agents. At a 1995 conference on the Kennedy assassination held in Nassau, Cuban officers Arturo Rodriguez and Fabian Escalante stated that Cubela intervened on Trafficante’s behalf in 1959 when he was imprisoned in an interment camp.73 Trafficante would himself later admit meeting Cubela “after the revolution in Cuba,” but claimed it was “just a hello and good-bye.”74