by Gus Russo
Soon, Johnson was his functioning self again, and by all accounts he handled the rest of the traumatic day and weekend with great aplomb. After phone consultations with Robert Kennedy, it was decided that a local judge could perform the official Presidential swearing-in. The ever-present, ever-prepared Marty Underwood jotted down the oath on two 5” x 7” index cards and handed them to his old friend Judge Sarah Hughes, who swore Johnson in as president. Afterward, Underwood took the cards and put them in his coat pocket. (He has kept them ever since.) By phone, Robert Kennedy instructed Underwood to destroy all remaining copies of the speech JFK was to give that night in Austin.94
Robert and John Kennedy 1959
THE CUBAN ADVERSARIES
THESE PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED CIA PHOTOS PROVIDE A GLIMPSE INTO THE LIFE OF THE YOUNG CUBAN REVOLUTIONARIES.
Che Guevara 1959
Fidel Castro taking time off from guerrilla warfare for a smoke break.
Drilling Fidel’s tooth using Singer Sewing equipment.
KENNEDY AND DULLES
November 28, 1961
JFK escorts longtime friend Allen Dulles to the dedication of the CIA’s new headquarters in Langley, Va.
Kennedy then surprises Dulles with the National Security Medal.
Later, inside the new building, Robert Kennedy beams in the background.
TWO YEARS LATER, RFK MADE CERTAIN DULLES PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN THE PANEL INVESTIGATING JFK’S DEATH.
William King Harvey
In his own hand, Harvey criticizes the Church Report.
Documents courtesy Harvey family member.
“MONGOOSE was the most frustrating damn thing I’ve ever tackled.”
General Edward Lansdale
Sam Halpern
“It was the Kennedy brothers demanding ‘boom and bang’ all over the island”
J.C. King receives the National Security Medal from Richard Helms.
KING, WHO PROPOSED THE ELIMINATION OF CASTRO, MAINTAINED A PRIVATE PHONE LINE TO JFK THROUGHOUT HIS PRESIDENCY. HE WAS ALSO IN TOUCH WITH RFK. THIS PHONE RECORD OF ONE CALL FROM KING To RFK CONCERNS CUBANS BOBBY ASKED HIM ABOUT. ACCORDING TO JOHN GORDON, IT TOOK PLACE WHILE RFK WAS DIRECTING A CASTRO MURDER PLOT CENTERED IN GUANTANAMO, CUBA.
Desmond FitzGerald.
“All I know is that I have to hate Castro.”
ON OCTOBER 11, 1963 AM/LASH INFORMED DES (“C/SAS”) THAT HE DEMANDED GPFOCUS’ (RFK’s) APPROVAL FOR THE CASTRO HIT. IT WAS THE SAME DAY DES CALLED AND SPOKE WITH RFK. TWO WEEKS LATER, DES MET WITH AM/LASH IN PARIS AND TOLD HIM HE HAD RFK’s SUPPORT.
LEE HARVEY OSWALD
As a child in New York, Oswald often played hooky and went to the Bronx Zoo.
IN THE MARINES, OSWALD BEGAN MEETING MYSTERIOUSLY WITH OFFICIALS FROM THE CUBAN CONSULATE NEAR LOS ANGELES (PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED PHOTO).
IN MINSK
Oswald, pictured here wearing shades and surrounded by fellow radio factory workers, liked being a celebrity, but it soon wore off.
Ella Germann (top right) Lee and Pavel Golovachev (bottom right)
Lee and Marina on the train leaving Minsk, May 1962.
“Castro needs defenders”
Photo taken March 31, 1963.
In 1993, FBI Special Agent James Hosty revisits the site of the famous backyard photos.
LAYTON MARTENS AND HIS WALLET ID
A page from Martens’ 1967 letter to Arcacha discussing “the letter from Robert Kennedy.”
Sergio Arcacha Smith
“Whenever we needed anything in New Orleans, I’d call Bobby Kennedy and he’d help us right away. He was always there for us.”
David William Ferrie
Ferrie at St. Mary’s Seminary in Cleveland (previously unpublished).
Ferrie with Bay of Pigs veteran Julian Buznedo.
Ferrie’s friends reunite in 1993 to share “Big Easy” memories. (Left to right: Layton Martens, Al Beauboeuf, Morris Brownlee, Allen Campbell.)
The New Orleans delegation of the Cuban Revolutionary Council posed with Ferrie’s plane (previously unpublished).
“THE WHITE HOUSE CUBANS”
With JFK at Palm Beach, December 1962 (previously unpublished).
Left to right: Alvaro Sanchez, Pepe San Roman, John Kennedy, Manuel Artime, Erneido Oliva, Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams.
Left to right: Roberto San Roman, Manuel Artime, Ramon Ferrer, Robert Kennedy, Enrique Ruiz-Williams, Pepe San Roman, Erneido Oliva.
“LOS AMIGOS DE ROBERTO”
ON THE DAY OF THE BAY OF PIGS PRISONER RELEASE, HARRY WILLIAMS CALLED RFK AT HOME. KENNEDY SAID, “YOU GOT IT ENRIQUE. THIS IS IT. THE GUY WITH THE BEARD HAS ACCEPTED.”
Left to right: Robert Kennedy, Enrique Ruiz-Williams, and James B. Donovan.
Cuban Coordinating Committee leader Cyrus Vance, presents Legion Merit Medal to fellow CCC staffer General Alexander Haig. Mrs. Haig looks on.
COLLIDING OBSESSIONS IN “THE BIG EASY”
Oswald’s notes. On the streets of New Orleans, he was learning of the White House plans for a reinvasion of Cuba. He intended to inform the Cubans in Mexico City.
V.T. LEE FURTHER ALERTED OSWALD TO THESE PLANS. THE CIA BELIEVED V.T. LEE WAS NOT ONLY ASSOCIATED WITH CUBAN ASSASSINS, BUT WAS FUNDED BY HAVANA.
THE EXILES IN NEW ORLEANS
William McLaney (left) and Mike McLaney (right) with unidentified friend (previously unpublished).
Lt. Commander John Gordon, USN
MEXICO CITY
“We thought Oswald might be a dangerous potential defector. . . We kept a special watch on him and his activities [in Mexico City].”— Win Scott
AM/LASH’S CIA CASE, OFFICER NESTOR SANCHEZ, FILED THIS MEMO OF HIS NOVEMBER 22, 1963 MEETING WITH AM/LASH. SANCHEZ LATER DELETED ANY REFERENCE TO THE POISON PEN, AS ORDERED BY DES FITZGERALD.
SCENES FROM AN ASSASSINATION
Oswald’s view from the Depository
The Motorcade
Taken the night of the assassination, this previously unpublished photo of the president’s limousine, clearly shows the relationship between JFK’s and John Conally’s positions (For details see Appendix A).
OSWALD IN CUSTODY
LIKE OSWALD, GILBERTO LOPEZ WAS LINKED TO BOTH V.T. LEE AND THE CUBAN CONSULATE IN LOS ANGELES. THIS CIA DOCUMENT NOTES HIS CROSSING FROM TEXAS INTO MEXICO HOURS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION.
Gilberto Alvarado (above), like Pedro Gutierrez, gave an account of seeing Oswald accept money in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City.
Pages from the Ruby Diary (previously unpublished [see Appendix C]).
THE WARREN COMMISSION
Left to right: Gerald Ford, Hale Boggs, Richard Russell, Earl Warren, John Sherman Cooper, John McCloy, Allen Dulles, and counsel Lee Rankin.
Senator Frank Church:
“I will have no part in pointing a finger of guilt at any former president.”
The Kennedy Re-Interment, March 14, 1967 (6 pm-midnight)
Left to right: Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Richard Cardinal Cushing, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
According to RFK’s press aide, Frank Mankiewicz—
“The President’s brain is in the grave. LBJ, Ted, Bobby and maybe, McNamara, buried it when the body was transferred.”
FOLLOWING AND ABOVE ARE EXAMPLES OF SEVENTY-FIVE PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY THE DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY THAT NIGHT.
“I found out something I never knew. I found out my world was not the real world.”
—Senator Robert F. Kennedy
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SUBURBAN NET CLOSES
Escape to Oak Cliff
Lee Oswald, his bus mired in the gridlock of downtown Dallas, hopped down and grabbed a cab (the first known use of such an extravagance by the poor, penny-pinching Oswald). He asked the cab driver to leave him off at the 500 block of North Beckley, five blocks from his Oak Cliff rooming house. Oswald ran home to fetch his pistol and a jacket in which to conceal it.
&n
bsp; The suburb of Oak Cliff was gripped by fear. Only a five-minute car ride away, an assassin (or assassins) had just shot off part of the head of President John Kennedy, and severely wounded Texas governor Connally. A half an hour had gone by, and still no one had been arrested. Were the killers now in one of these Dallas suburbs? Although the rest of the country was in shock, little attention was paid to what Dallasites were experiencing: they, too, were shocked, but they were also in abject fear for their lives.
Elcan Elliott, who by coincidence lived just a few blocks from Oswald’s rooming house, was slowly driving the streets of Oak Cliff, searching for his 14-year-old daughter. Elliott, who spoke of his experiences for the first time in 1994, was worried about his daughter’s safety. “There was no one on the streets,” recalls Elliott. Residents, either caught up in terror or curiosity, or both, shut themselves inside, glued to their television sets or radios. Anyone walking around stuck out in this vacuum of inactivity.
At about the 700 block of North Beckley, Elliott saw a suspicious looking character “relieving himself” on some bushes, in full view of anyone who might venture out. “That’s what first attracted me to him,” says Elliott. Curious and concerned, Elliott followed the young man, circling around streets, to catch up with him.
“I watched as he would walk down a block, stop, look around, and reverse direction,” says Elliot. “He did this three or four times. He looked lost, bewildered.”1 At one point, Elliott was less than 10 feet from the man as he approached Lancaster Road. Coming face-to-face with Elliott, the man again reversed direction. When Oswald’s face flashed on national television later that day, Elliot instantly recognized him as the man he had encountered. “There’s absolutely no doubt about it,” Elliott insists.
A disoriented Lee Oswald was once again calling attention to himself. Had he missed a promised rendezvous—a ride to a private airstrip, as alleged by various sources in Mexico City? Did Cuban agents in Mexico City make him promises they never intended to fulfill? Was he searching for a bus that would carry him to the Mexican border? Oswald had once told fellow Marine Nelson Delgado that if he were ever running from the law, he would attempt to enter Mexico, and from there travel to Cuba or Russia. “That’s the way I would go about it,” Oswald had said.
The Warren Commission would later check the bus schedules and verify that a bus route traversed Lancaster Road, near where Elliott saw Oswald, which would have eventually taken the assassin to the United States-Mexico border at Laredo, Texas. The bus transfer Oswald had asked for when he first boarded in downtown Dallas would have been accepted on such a bus.2 Warren Commission attorney David Belin has written, “It is likely Oswald was fleeing to Mexico City.”3
Oswald had barely enough cash on him ($13.87) to pay for a bus ticket to the border. However, as Belin queries, “Is it not reasonable to assume that he would have taken cash with him unless he were in league with someone who could provide funds for him when he reached his destination?”4
As Washington began to react to Kennedy’s murder, mysterious events were occurring in the Dallas area. These incidents indicate three possible connections between Oswald and a shadowy net of conspiracy. Whether any or all point toward definite Cuban involvement in the assassination may never be known. It is known, however, that none of these incidents, or those in the following chapters suggesting possible Cuban involvement, were sufficiently looked into during the investigation of the President’s murder. These dark events, seen in bits and pieces through the filter of witnesses of undetermined reliability, nevertheless hint that Oswald had somewhere he was planning to go after shooting President Kennedy and returning to Oak Cliff.
Redbird
The first example is a “getaway” plane Oswald might have been planning to escape on—if he had gotten there in time after the assassination. “There was a plane revving up at Redbird,” remembers the FBI’s Jim Hosty. “It was disturbing people’s TV reception. It took off around 3 p.m. [November 22, 1963]. We did an investigation on it. We ran it out but it got nowhere.”5
Redbird Field was a private airstrip located four miles to the south of Oswald’s Beckley Street apartment. Over the years, a number of allegations, emanating particularly from the Cuban community, have maintained that Oswald was to have been flown out of this tiny private airstrip by his fellow conspirators. Cuban exile activist Dr. Fernando Penebaz, for example, alleged that “the head of Castro’s Air Force” had flown into Dallas to meet Oswald.6
This recalls the story of Quinton Pino Machado, a strong-arm in Castro’s Diplomatic Service, who allegedly cut a deal with Oswald to bring him to Cuba after the assassination (See Chapter 10). Certainly if some sort of deal was made in Mexico City between Oswald and the Cubans, an escape plan from a private airstrip would have been logical.
What elevates all this beyond speculation is that there were, in fact, mysterious goings-on at Redbird, on November 22 and days before—strange events that were never sufficiently explained.
Wayne January, an employee of Redbird in 1963, remembers an incident that took place on Monday, November 18—four days before the assassination:
I was visited by three men who asked about renting a plane for a trip to Mexico on November 22. The types of questions they asked made me suspicious—they wanted to know about fuel consumption, vectors, distances— things a pilot should know. That’s why I later reported it to the FBI. As I recall, the men wanted to go to a village on the Pacific coast of Mexico. When Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, he instantly reminded me of the man who stayed in the car.7
The air traffic controller at Redbird on November 22, 1963 was Louis D. Gaudin. He told the author (and the FBI) that on the day of the shooting, he saw a green and white Comanche-type aircraft being serviced at the airport’s Texair facility. Gaudin spoke with the plane’s three well-dressed occupants. “They said they were headed southbound,” recalled Gaudin in 1994. “The plane took off between 2:30 and 3 o’clock. Forty minutes later, it returned with only two occupants. It was met by a part-time employee who was moonlighting from the Dallas Police Department. The plane then took off again.”8
Texair’s owner, Merritt Gobel, is reluctant (and apparently frightened) to discuss the matter. In 1994, he said, “[The flight] was common knowledge. That’s all I can say.”9
The Redbird allegations, if true, correspond neatly to what Senate investigators later referred to as “The Cubana Airlines Incident.” According to CIA documents released in 1977, two Cuban men (on the night of JFK’s murder) arrived at the Mexico City airport from Dallas, via Tijuana, on a twin-engine aircraft. The CIA received “highly reliable” information that the men were met at the Mexico airport by Cuban diplomatic personnel from the Cuban embassy. One of the men boarded either a FAR (Revolutionary Armed Forces) or Cubana Airlines plane, avoiding customs, and traveled to Cuba in the cockpit to avoid mixing with the passengers.10
Congressional investigators concluded that the Cubana schedule made available to them eliminated that airline as the culprit in the transfer. However, the FAR flight remains a possibility.
The passenger on-board was identified as Miguel Casas Sayez (“Miguelito”), a well-known Cuban gangster. Further investigation revealed that Casas was an agent of the G-2 (Cuban Intelligence). Casas’ background was that of an ardent revolutionary who idolized Raul Castro. Known as a strong-arm himself, he often “went beyond what was required of him to get the job done.” A source close to Casas reported:
Miguelito has just arrived from the U.S. He was in Dallas on the day of the assassination of Kennedy, but managed to leave through the frontier of Laredo; already in Mexico a FAR plane brought him to Cuba. You know that he is one of Raul’s men [referring to Raul Castro]. Miguelito is very brave, very brave!11
The arrival of these mysterious men in Havana is underscored by other curious arrivals in Cuba, according to a Cuban informant of undisclosed location. The source stated that a well-known Cuban scientist friend of his witnessed peculiar activity at the
Havana Airport on November 22, 1963. The scientist related that at approximately 5 p.m., he saw a plane with Mexican markings land and park at the far side of the field. Two men, whom he recognized as Cuban “gangsters,” alighted, entered the rear entrance of the administration building, and disappeared, bypassing mandatory customs procedures. His curiosity aroused, the scientist was able to learn that the plane had arrived from Dallas via Mexico City. (Recall that the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City was known to occasionally allow passage without the requisite passport stamps.)
The CIA purposely did not follow-up on the information. By the time it received the information in 1964, it said, its source had died. Attached to the CIA report is a routing slip with the following handwriting by an unknown CIA officer: “I’d let this die a natural death, as the Bureau is doing.”12