Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Just when Des FitzGerald and the CIA thought the news could get no worse, it did. On Sunday, November 24, while Oswald was meeting his maker, CIA headquarters received a cable from the Mexico City Station. The station had been compiling a list of individuals recently seen in the Soviet Embassy with Oswald’s contact there, KGB agent Valery Kostikov. One name on the list was Rolando Cubela Secades, known to Bobby Kennedy and Des FitzGerald as AM/LASH.72

  A second cable arrived that day with still more frightening information: Cubela was acquainted with Theresa Proenza, the first person to meet Oswald in the Cuban Embassy, and a counter-intelligence target of the CIA. She functioned as the Cultural Attaché for the embassy, and in this capacity had arranged press conferences for Cubela when he visited Mexico City. Sinister implications were unavoidable: Proenza’s close friend Sylvia Duran admitted to having affairs with both Oswald and Cuban Delegate to the UN Carlos Lechuga. Lechuga was the focus of the Kennedys’ “Track One” initiative, linked to a pro-Castro terrorist cell, and the recipient of warning letters from Fernando Fernandez, who had infiltrated the New Orleans bases of the Cuba Project.

  FitzGerald thus became consumed by the possibility that Castro, through any number of contacts, had found out about AM/LASH—and that many of these contacts had also met with Lee Harvey Oswald. Now FitzGerald, presented with a list of Cuban Embassy visitors that included Cubela, was asked for any information he could add to the investigation of Kennedy’s death. Did, for example, anyone in the Agency know Cubela?

  Although RFK’s friend FitzGerald knew of the implications, and in fact knew Cubela, he didn’t say a word. The scene was described by Evan Thomas of Newsweek:

  FitzGerald kept silent Technically, he did not have to answer. His super secret Special Affairs Staff was exempt from queries from the Counterintelligence staff. . . A decade later, when the CIA official who was assigned to oversee the Agency’s investigation of the assassination learned about Cubela, he stated, “That would have become an absolutely vital factor in analyzing the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination.”

  At lunch on Sunday, FitzGerald was at home watching television when Jack Ruby shot Oswald. . .[His] wife Barbara was shocked to see her husband burst into tears. She had never seen him cry before. “Now,” said FitzGerald, “we’ll never know.”73

  Years later, an undated memo from FitzGerald would surface that clearly conveyed his fears about the AM/LASH operation: “The AM/LASH circle is wide and each new friend of whom we learn seems to have knowledge of the plan,” FitzGerald wrote. “I believe the problem is a more serious and basic one. Fidel reportedly knew that this group was plotting against him and once enlisted its support. Hence, we cannot rule out the possibility of provocation.”74

  Continuing the coverup, on Monday, November 25, 1963, Nestor Sanchez, Cubela’s case officer, drafted a routine “contact report” of his Paris meeting with Cubela on November 22. The report conveniently omitted the passing of the poison pen to Cubela. Sanchez later told the Church Committee that FitzGerald ordered him to drop that detail from his report.75

  The night after the murder, the Secret Service brought over to the CIA a copy of an 8mm home movie taken of the murder, the “Zapruder film.” Now, in another part of the CIA’s headquarters, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the Agency’s top photo analyst, Dino Brugioni, watched in horror as the top of the president’s head exploded in a shower of crimson. Brugioni recently recalled:

  There were six or seven of us at the meeting. We were asked to time it, which was difficult because the camera was spring-loaded. We also developed still frames, which we enlarged and mounted on a large board which [Director] McCone took over to President Johnson. Later, we had the U-2 photograph Oswald and Marina’s residences in Minsk. We gave the photos to Richard Helms.76

  Cuba on Their Minds

  Official Washington assured itself early that the Soviets had not been involved in the assassination. Top secret wiretaps and intercepts by the National Security Agency made it clear that Moscow was clearly surprised and alarmed over the killing—Khrushchev appeared downright frantic. Cuba, however, was a different matter. Hal Hendrix, the Miami-based Scripps-Howard reporter known for his Agency contacts at the JM/WAVE (Miami) Station, wrote on November 24 that, “Federal investigators are probing reports that Oswald. . . may have been in touch with Castro’s G-2 or espionage agents in this country.”77 Outside of Oswald’s connection to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, it has never been revealed which Cuban agents the government considered to be likely contacts for Oswald.

  Even though most in the CIA were unaware of the AM/LASH-Des FitzGerald connection, thoughts of a Castro-based plot dominated the Agency’s thinking immediately after the murder. A perusal of the record reflects a constant theme: Cuba.

  Consider the following CIA activity:

  Saturday, Nov 23—CIA Director John McCone meets with LBJ to discuss information from the CIA in Mexico City; the CIA cables AM/LASH’s case officer, telling him to break off contact with AM/LASH because of the presidents assassination. The Agency also wants the planned arrest of Sylvia Duran called off, saying, “The arrest could jeopardize U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility.”

  Sunday, Nov 24—McCone meets with LBJ, this time concerning the CIA’s operational plans against Cuba.

  Monday, Nov 25—The Mexico City Station sends a dispatch to CIA headquarters reminding them of Castro’s September 7 statement threatening U.S. leaders.

  Tuesday, Nov 26—U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann sends a cable to the State Department, expressing his fears that Cubans were involved in the assassination. (He initiates his own investigation, but is stopped by the White House.)

  Monday, Dec 2—CIA Director McCone meets at 10 a.m. with LBJ and national security advisor McGeorge Bundy; McCone’s calendar reveals that, at 3 p.m., he has a still secret meeting to discuss Cuba in the CIA’s conference room.

  Wednesday, Dec 4—The CIA receives a report from one of its Cuban agents that he had met Oswald in Cuba, Mexico City, or the United States. This agent believes that the Cuban government employed assassins and carried out at least one assassination in Mexico.

  Sunday, Dec 8—CIA Headquarters cables the Florida Station ordering it to halt two planned operations against Cuba—one of which was to deliver weapons to the assassin AM/LASH.

  Monday, Dec 9—A memo to McCone notes that dissident anti-Castro Cubans in Cuba want assurances that they will not be liquidated and will be protected following the planned plot and imminent coup in Cuba. (The fact that even people in Cuba were preparing for the coup provides further evidence that it was imminent, and likely would have occurred had the Kennedy assassination not intervened.)

  Tuesday, Dec 10—McCone again meets secretly on Cuba in the CIA conference room.78

  Across the Potomac at the White House, concerns about Cuba mirrored those at the CIA. Army General Alexander Haig, who had been assigned to Robert Kennedy’s super-secret Cuban Coordinating Committee, was now busy supervising the late president’s funeral arrangements at Arlington National Cemetery. On Sunday morning (Nov 24), Haig was at the White House when he witnessed his CCC superiors Cyrus Vance, Robert McNamara, and others headed into a closed door meeting with President Johnson. At the time, Haig paid little heed to the meeting, but in the coming days, it would take on added significance. Haig later wrote:

  Very soon after President Kennedy’s death, an intelligence report crossed my desk. In circumstantial detail, it stated that Oswald had been seen in Havana in the company of Cuban intelligence officers several days before the events in Dallas, and that he traveled there by way of Mexico City. . . I walked the report over to my superiors, some of whom had attended that Sunday morning meeting with President Johnson. Reading it caused their faces to go ashen.

  “Al,” one of them said, “you will forget, from this moment on, that you ever read this piec
e of paper, or that it ever existed.” The report was destroyed.79

  Haig was impressed with the report’s detail—“locale, precise notations of time, and more.” He recently confirmed to the author that the report was hand-delivered to him by a CIA officer, and added that the report was read by both CCC leaders, Vance and Califano. “To this day, I’m convinced that Oswald not only visited Mexico City, but also Havana.”

  It is possible that Haig was reading the report filed by “Jeremy Ryan” (pseudonym), a CIA Chief of Station posted in Latin America. Recently, Ryan recalled to the author the day Kennedy was killed—a day when Ryan was attending a pre-arranged lunch meeting with a communist source he had developed. “This man was the best recruitment I had made in my thirty years with the Agency. He was very close to both Fidel and Ché [Guevara].” As the recruitment was reconstructing recent conversations with Fidel and Che, in broke a Ryan intermediary with the news of Kennedy’s murder. “On hearing the news from Dallas, he [the source] broke down in tears, and said, ‘Oh, my God. They said they weren’t going to do that.’”

  Ryan immediately filed a report of this conversation with headquarters. “When I reported that discussion, everything came down on me like a thunderstorm. Headquarters wanted me to develop more information. The most I got was that my source had met Oswald in Cuba. Based on this source’s known reliability, I’m convinced to this day that Oswald was in Cuba.”80 We are left to wonder: Are the Haig and Ryan “file” stories connected to McCone’s briefing of Johnson on the night of the assassination?

  The reliability of the Oswald-in-Havana allegation was further bolstered by sources for the CIA’s Miami JM/WAVE Station. According to one such source, Oswald was seen in Havana sometime during the first week of October in the company of “Comandante Miranda,” cited as an officer in the Cuban Navy.81

  A source close to the CIA’s Mexico Station Chief Win Scott likewise recalled information about Oswald making a quick back-and-forth hop from Mexico City to Havana, saying, “It had something to do with luggage that was found at the airport.”82 This might be a reference to what Warren Commission staffers referred to as the “two suitcase problem.” During the official investigation into the President’s death, it was learned that Oswald had left New Orleans with two suitcases, but was seen in Mexico City with only one.83

  It should be recalled that Oswald spent four largely unaccounted-for days during his trip to Mexico City. In addition, after returning to Dallas, Oswald’s whereabouts are unknown during the three days between October 7 and October 11. Either of these gaps could have easily afforded him the time for a plane trip to Havana. Also, recall that the Cuban Embassy was known to issue false identifications, and to allow travelers to cross borders without stamping their passports. Thus, there might be no record if, as Haig and others suspect, Oswald had journeyed to the island.

  The meetings delineated above—between November 23 and December 10—represent only some of what the CIA and the White House were doing about Cuba. A complete list of the Cuba-oriented activity would require many pages.84 A CIA memo later uncovered by Congressional investigator James Johnston underscored the obvious reason for the meetings. Generated within the first twenty-four hours after the assassination, the memo stated, according to Johnston, that “there was reason enough to believe that Oswald was part of a foreign plot.”85

  It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which Bobby Kennedy was informed of the drama being played out over Cuba and Mexico City at CIA headquarters—the shroud of secrecy over his papers is so total. However, given the fact that Bobby practically ran the CIA from 1961 through nearly the end of 1963, and had trusted allies like Des FitzGerald, Allen Dulles, and Richard Helms in key CIA positions, he probably was aware of everything.

  In a memo, Win Scott indicated that RFK’s friend, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, was being kept informed of the Mexico City developments.86 It seems unlikely that Katzenbach had no discussions with his boss, RFK, on issues such as Oswald’s link with “544 Camp St.” and the Kennedys’ trusted CRC. In addition, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico in 1963, Thomas Mann—appointed by JFK—later gave a statement regarding Bobby Kennedy’s involvement.

  Mann had been conducting his own investigation of the killing through his contacts inside the various agencies and embassies in Mexico City. He had convinced himself that there was a Cuban component to the crime. Washington was, rightfully, concerned that Mann might jeopardize its own investigation. In 1993, Mann recalled what happened next:

  I received this instruction to drop the investigation. . . It was the only time in my career that I was ever told to stop investigating. I still think it was strange. . . I had this suspicion that our intelligence community, which included Win Scott, knew much more about it [the assassination]. . .[Later] I got death threats, quite often in envelopes slipped under the embassy gates.87

  Mann would later add, “The message I received from Hoover. . . was, ‘We don’t want to hear any more about this case. And tell the Mexican government not to do any more investigating. We just want to hush it up.’”88 When asked in 1976 why he didn’t challenge the order to cease his investigation, Mann replied, “If the President’s brother thought Oswald did it entirely on his own, I didn’t see why I should be more Catholic than the Pope.”89

  Mann wasn’t the only one receiving the “cease and desist” orders. Oswald’s FBI case officer, Jim Hosty, soon became aware of Bobby Kennedy’s direct control of the CIA’s Mexico City investigation. Hosty later befriended Michael J. DeGuire, an FBI official stationed in the American embassy in Mexico City at the time of the assassination. According to DeGuire, “President Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy ordered intelligence agents in Mexico to stop pursuing a possible Cuban or Soviet connection.”90 Hosty recalled that DeGuire added, “There was a near mutiny on the part of the CIA agents when they were told this. It wasn’t until they received word that Attorney General Robert Kennedy concurred that they finally agreed to cease and desist.”91

  Mexico City—The Day After Kennedy’s Murder

  Meanwhile, the reverberations of Dallas had hit Mexico City like a nuclear firestorm. On the day after the assassination, CIA headquarters in Langley received a cable from the Mexico City Station informing them that the Mexican Police were detaining and planning to arrest Sylvia Duran, the suspected triple agent with whom Oswald had been in contact, to interrogate her about Oswald. Headquarters immediately telephoned the Mexico Station ordering them to prevent the arrest. If Cuba was involved in the president’s assassination, the CIA wanted to find out before the Mexico City police did. Considering that Duran was the CIA’s occasional asset, and a close friend of CIA target Theresa Proenza, a Mexican police interrogation of Duran might be disastrously compromising, even if she knew nothing of the assassination.

  Thomas Karamessines, Deputy to Richard Helms, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, has testified that “the CIA feared that the Cubans were responsible [for the assassination], and that Duran might reveal this during an interrogation.” The Mexico Station cabled back that the arrest could not be stopped. Karamessines replied, saying that the arrest “could jeopardize U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility.”92 The CIA was also aware that automobiles owned by Duran’s family bore Texas license plates, and, as stated before, that members of the family were known to make frequent trips into the state from Mexico.

  The CIA was unsuccessful, however, in preventing the arrest, and was forced to settle for assisting Mexican authorities preparing their Duran interrogation questions. At this time, the CIA was clearly very interested in the possibility of a Cuban conspiracy. Among the questions it submitted on a written list were:

  “Was the assassination of President Kennedy planned by Fidel Castro. . . and were the final details worked out inside the Cuban Embassy in Mexico?”

  “Who were Oswald’s contacts during the period 26 September 1963 to 3 October 1963?”

  “If Castro planned
that Oswald assassinate President Kennedy, did the Soviets have any knowledge of these plans?”

  Though these were, and remain, the three most critical questions surrounding the assassination, the CIA held out little hope that the Mexicans would pose them to Duran—relations between Mexico and Cuba were sensitive, and Mexico was one of the only countries in Latin America to maintain diplomatic ties with Havana. The Agency was forced to sweat it out, wondering how many secrets Duran was privy to, and worrying that her divulging of those secrets might compromise CIA operations inside the Cuban embassy. As expected, Duran’s Mexican interrogators chose not to ask the critical questions about possible Cuban or Soviet complicity.93

  Also on this day after the assassination, Duran’s friend Elena Garro and her daughter, outraged at what they felt to be Cuban complicity in the crime, visited Duran at her place of work. As Garro herself later admitted, the two proceeded to cause a ruckus by pointing fingers at Cuban Embassy employees and screaming, “Assassins!”94 Afterwards, a close friend, Manuel Calvillo, contacted Elena Garro.95 An undercover agent for the Mexican Government, Calvillo had contacts both in the Cuban Embassy and with local police sources used by the CIA’s Win Scott. Calvillo warned Garro that she was in danger from the “Communists.” He proceeded to take Elena and her daughter—presumably with their consent—to a hotel to get them out of sight for a week.96

  Havana

  The CIA wasn’t alone in its consuming interest about the Duran interrogation. Officials in Havana were burning up the phone lines to Cuban representatives in the Mexico City consulate. The Mexico City Police might be the first to know if there would be another world war, but Havana wanted to be second.