Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics
Page 10
2 Memo of 11 December 1963 to Chief/Soviet Russia, from Neil Huntley, C/SRI, "Additional Notes and Comments on the Oswald Case;" CIA Document # 376-154.
3 Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
4 John Martino, "Cuba and the Kennedy Assassination," Human Events, December 21, 1963, 3.
5 The chief of these allies were the JURE leaders Manuel Ray, Ramon Barquin, and Napoleon Becquer (10 AH 137; cf. New York Times, April 19, 1962). See pp. 47-49.
6 Scott, Deep Politics, 116; 11 AH 65.
7 Jackson Daily News, September 28, 1963.
8 WAVE 8562 to DIR; cf. WAVE 7495 of 14 Nov 63 to DIR, reporting (via Bernard Barker) exile feeling of "U.S.-Soviet deal backing AMTHUG [Castro] overthrow and establishment Tito-type Commie government."
9 Scott, Deep Politics, 215; Revilo Oliver, American Opinion, March 1964; 15 WH 710.
10 Fonzi, 292.
11 Fonzi, 292-93.
12 Magnus Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 278.
13 WCD 1020.1-6,16; 26 WH 424-25; Scott, Deep Politics, 338.
14 WCD 916.2-3. Bethel was also involved in another false story of hit teams dispatched by Castro to kill Kennedy: sec WCD 893.1-7; 22 WH 864; Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 60-61.
15 WCD 770.7-9; Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 18, 20.
16 Lopez Report, 127-28; Fonzi, 293. After interrogating Phillips informally on this issue. Hardway told Fonzi that, "based on the research he had done tracking the routing of the cables and the lack of credible answers about them from Phillips, he believed there was a strong possibility the cables were created after the fact" (Fonzi, 293).
17 David Phillips, The Night Watch (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 141-42; quoted in Scott, Deep Politics, 122.
18 MEXI 7104 of 27 November 1963; CIA Document #174-616.
19 Mexico City cable of 26 November 1963 (MEXI 7067?), retransmitted as DIR 85199 of 27 November, WCD 1000B.4; WCD 1000C.2.
20 Memo of 26 November, WCD 1000A; MEXI 7083 of 26 November.
21 MANAGUA cable of 26 November, 262237Z; DIR 85196 of 27 November 1963.
22 MEXI 7072 of 26 November 1963; CIA Document #128-590.
23 MEXI 7104 of 27 November 1963; MEXI cable of November 28 1963, Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, 441. Cf. 3 AH 569.
24 DIR 84916 of 23 November; Lopez Report, 185-86; Schweiker-Hart Report, 25.
25 DIR 85371 of 28 November 1963; Lopez Report, 187; Schweiker-Hart Report, 29.
26 3 AH 91; cf. 3 AH 86. Note that the DFS exempted the Soviets from their hypothetical conspiracy, as did Ambassador Mann (Summers, 441).
27 Scott, Deep Politics, 123; Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975), 274-75; Dick Russell, 454, 457-58. In late 1963 Díaz Ordáz was on leave as the Presidential candidate of the ruling PRI; but his replacement as Acting Minister, Luís Echeverría, was also a CIA asset on the CIA payroll.
28 For example, the Americans knew that Durán’s name and the telephone number of the Cuban Consulate, 11-28-47, were in Oswald’s address book (16 WH 54). Durán told the House committee that the DFS "asked me I don’t know how many times, the way that I used to give my name and telephone number and they made me write and they take the paper out and then again, they ask me, how do you do this, and I write it down, and I give the paper. I think I do this five or six times" (3 AH 102).
29 MEXI 7067(?) of 26 November 1963; WCD 1000B.
30 Dispatch HMMA-32243 of 13 June 1967 from COS, Mexico City, to Chief, Western Hemisphere Division; CIA Document # 1084-965.
31 TX-1937 of 26 May 1967, CIA Document # 1084-965, reporting interview of informant in safehouse on 25 May, 1967. John Newman has plausibly identified the informant as Luis Alberu, a double agent turned by the CIA instead the Cuban Embassy (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 386; cf. 360). In 1964 the Station had also heard the allegation of an Oswald-Durin liaison from a dubious witness, Elena Garro, with strong DFS connections (Lopez Report, 207, 220; 3 AH 302).
32 Lopez Report, 254.
33 3 AH 86.
34 24 WH 565.
35 Lopez Report, 190; Scott, "The Lopez Report," 6.
36 Scott, Deep Politics, 94.
37 Russell, 454.
38 Oleg Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination (New York: Birch Lane/Carol Publishing, 1993), 181.
39 John Ranelagh, The Agency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 422-23. Raborn is remembered in the Agency as the man who asked "Who’s this fellow Oligarchy?" and who thought that "KUWAIT" was a CIA cryptonym.
40 Burton Hersh, The Old Boys (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 160-61.
41 Ranelagh, 448.
42 Johnson did invoke the threat of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee as a major part of his case for a Warren Commission. As a man with years of Washington experience, he must have known of the on-going collaboration between Eastland and Sourwine of the Subcommittee with elements inside the CIA.
43 Leonard Mosley, Dulles (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1978), 473. Although Dulles had offered to resign at the moment of failure, the offer had been refused. He declined to offer his resignation again, after being rebuked in a secret in-house CIA review. Thus he was fired, and without prior warning (ibid.).
44 Charles J.V. Murphy, "Cuba: The Record Set Straight," Fortune, September 1961. Discussion in Paul W. Blackstock, The Stategy of Subversion (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964), 250; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), 19-20.
45 Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 95; E. Howard Hunt, Under Cover (New York: Berkley, 1974), 216.
46 Fonzi 331, 346n. Cf. Scott, Deep Politics, 54, 67, 322. Phillips had not served in óSS; his mentor Hunt had.
47 Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 260.
48 David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Random House, 1992), 39; Scott, Deep Politics, 67.
49 11 AH 57, 476, 485.
50 "Scelso’"s role is hard to assess. On November 23, 1963, when ordered by Assistant Deputy Director of Plans Karamessines to tell the Mexico City CIA Station to stop the arrest of Silvia Durán, "Scelso" entered a memo for the record, which said in part, "We phoned as ordered, against my wishes, and also wrote a FLASH cable which we did not then send" (TX-1240 of 23 November 1963; C/WH/3 memo for record; emphasis added). On the other hand, he soon afterward prepared a summary report for Helms which was transmitted to President Johnson. "This report stated that Oswald probably was a lone assassin who had no visible ties to Soviet or Cuban intelligence though such ties could not be excluded from consideration" (11 AH 477).
51 Mosley, 477-78; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 536, 663.
52 11 AH 58.
53 11 AH 47, 477-79.
54 4 AH 215; 11 AH 476, 479, 491; AR 205.
55 4 AH 232-35.
56 4 AH 215, 232.
57 Hersh, Old Boys, 317; citing Seymour Hersh, New York Times Magazine, June 25, 1978.
58 Mangold. 170.
59 Lopez Report, 128.
60 Szulc, Compulsive Spy, 96, 99.
61 Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991), 193. Hunt had made the sworn statement, "I was not in Mexico between the years 1961 and 1970." Phillips testified under oath that he had seen Hunt in Mexico City "sometime between September of 1961 and March of 1965," adding that he "must have seen him once or twice" somewhere in Mexico prior to November 22, 1963.
62 Nedzi Hearing, 518 (June 28, 1973).
63 Wilmington Sunday News Journal, August 20, 1978; reprinted in Lane, Plausible Denial, 152-55; Dick Russell, 474-75. In his book Lane claims that former CIA official Victor Marchetti had told him about this memo prior to the Trento story, citing Marine intelligence Colonel William Corson as his source (Lane, 134-35). Corson was close to Trento; the two eventually were co-authors of the book Widows.
64 Ibid.
66 San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 1974, 1.
67 Szulc, 95.
68 Mosley, 475-77.
69 Mosley, 477.
V. THE KENNEDY-CIA DIVERGENCE OVER CUBA
July 1994
In all the hundreds of thousands of words of official documentation about the John F. Kennedy assassination, one of the major gaps has been the full range of Kennedy’s policies in 1963 towards Cuba. It is clear however that he was simultaneously pursuing more than one "track" in 1963, and that in one of these tracks ~ the exploration of a possible accommodation with Castro through direct contacts—the President pointedly excluded the CIA.1
The carrot of accommodation was not the only track. We shall see that by June the Kennedys were also applying the stick of sabotage operations (in conjunction with the CIA). But there were powerful reasons prompting the Kennedys towards accommodation and even direct contacts with Castro representatives, reasons pointing beyond Cuba to the President’s larger hopes for accommodation and improved relations with the Soviet Union.
In 1963 both strategies of accommodation, with Cuba and with the Soviet Union, developed increasingly hostile opposition, in the country, in Congress, and within the Administration. Particularly within the CIA, those elements still smarting from the Bay of Pigs defeat went beyond their policy directives to frustrate the accommodation track.
I shall argue that senior officials within the CIA, notably Richard Helms and Desmond FitzGerald, knew of the Kennedy brothers’ secret moves to initiate direct communications with Castro, disapproved of them, and took steps to poison them. Their most flagrant action was to initiate a new series of secret meetings with a known assassin and suspected double agent, Rolando Cubela Secades (code-named AMLASH), at which a major topic of discussion was the assassination of Fidel Castro. Helms, without consulting the Attorney General, authorized a contact plan whereby in October 1963 (and possibly again on November 22) FitzGerald met with Cubela, and promised him material assistance in assassinating Castro, while posing (falsely) as a "personal representative of Robert F. Kennedy."2
This meeting seems to have been designed to poison the informal Kennedy-Castro contacts already under way. For there was already anxiety within the Agency that Cubela, who had refused to be polygraphed in 1962, was reporting the substance of these contacts to Castro. We shall see that FitzGerald’s own Counterintelligence Chief, Joseph Langosch, recommended with another CIA officer that FitzGerald not meet with Cubela.3
There were good reasons for their advice. On September 7, 1963, within hours of the first new CIA meeting with Cubela in Brazil, Castro had turned up at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana, and warned "U.S. leaders" that "if they are aiding U.S. terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe."4 At the time, and thereafter, "nervous CIA men wondered whether Castro had chosen the Brazilian Embassy to make his threat in order to signal his knowledge of the Sao Paolo meeting."5
It cannot be conclusively proven that these secret assassination rendez-vous with Cubela from September to November 1963 were designed to frustrate the President’s accommodation track. (One clear factor here is that once again there has been much lying in high places; we can name some of those who have engaged in possibly felonious cover-up.) But even to entertain this hypothesis of a perverse design is to raise a serious question about the recurring stories we shall consider in Chapter III, that Oswald either offered information about a CIA plot to kill Castro, or alternatively offered, within the Cuban Consulate, to kill Kennedy (a move allegedly interpreted by the Cubans as a crude but official CIA provocation). Either of these two initiatives, while too clumsy and indeed bizarre to gain Cuban interest and "assistance," could nonetheless have had the immediate effect of further poisoning any trust that was beginning to develop, outside the CIA, between representatives of Castro and the President.
It is not gratuitous to link Oswald’s provocative talk of assassination with FitzGerald’s. For as we shall see, Oswald in Mexico was being watched and reported on by Ann Goodpasture, a member of the same small conspiratorial FI/D Staff (or Staff D), which at the same time was engaged on the tightly held secret task of preparing exotic poison devices for delivery to Cubela, possibly by FitzGerald himself, on November 22, 1963.6
The "Separate Track" of Accommodation and Direct Contacts With Castro
On March 30, 1963, the U.S. State and Justice Departments (the latter of course headed by Robert Kennedy) jointly announced that they would take "every step necessary" to ensure that raids by Cuban exiles against Cuba were "not launched, manned, or equipped from U.S. territory." Surveillance of the exiles and their bases was immediately intensified.7
The primary concern behind this policy shift was not Cuba but the Soviet Union. For some weeks the Cuban exile group Alpha 66, and its spin-off, Comandos L, had been targeting Soviet ships in Cuban waters, hoping to wreck the U.S.-Soviet agreement over Cuba that had been reached after the Cuban Missile Crisis. (The terms of that agreement had never been fully disclosed, but were generally understood to include a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union proceeded to withdraw its missiles and most of its troops.)8 As we shall see, these anti-Soviet raids had the blessing and financial backing of Henry Luce and his Time-Life empire, a determined opponent of accommodation with the Soviets over Cuba or any other part of the world.9 Some also believe that the Soviet-targeted raids may have been masterminded by the CIA, possibly by an operative with the pseudonym "Maurice Bishop."10
Behind the Kennedy decision to curb the exile raids may have been the desire to bolster Khrushchev’s waning status in Moscow against the rising hardliners, headed by Frol Kozlov, who sought reconciliation with Beijing at the expense of U.S.-Soviet reconciliation.11
Nevertheless the March 30 announcement had the important spin-off for Kennedy’s Cuba policy of reviving what McGeorge Bundy called the "separate track" of accommodation with Castro, as documented by the Assassination Report of the Church Committee:
As early as January 4, 1963, Bundy proposed to President Kennedy that the possibility of communicating with Castro be explored. (Memorandum, Bundy to the President, 1/4/63). Bundy’s memorandum on "Cuba Alternatives" of April 23 [sic, i.e. April 21], 1963, also listed the "gradual development of some form of accommodation with Castro" among policy alternatives. (Bundy memorandum, 4/21/63) At a meeting on June 3, 1963, the Special Group agreed it would be a "useful endeavour" to explore "various possibilities of establishing channels of communication to Castro." (Memorandum of Special Group meeting, 6/6/63)12
The date of the April memo, April 21, is an interesting one. That very morning the New York Times had reponed Castro’s charge that the U.S. had abandoned a plan for a second invasion of Cuba in favor of a plot to assassinate Cuban leaders. The charge, as reported, may have been in error. Bundy’s memo actually called for the National Security Council’s Standing Group (successor to the Ex Com of the Cuban Missile crisis) to assess the consequences to the U.S. of Castro’s dying independently. As might have been expected, in May the Group agreed with the CIA’s Board of National Estimates that the consequences would probably be unfavorable. Castro’s probable successors, Raul Castro and Che Guevara, were long-time overt Marxist-Leninists, deemed to be even more anti-U.S. than Fidel.13
Soon after the Bundy memo and NSC Group meeting of April 23, Averell Harriman made a quick trip to Khrushchev in Moscow as the President’s personal emissary. Harriman’s view was that Khrushchev and his bureaucracy were divided over the issue of a hard line or accommodation towards America, much as Kennedy and the CIA were rumored to be.14 Harriman had three major agenda items to discuss which threatened to block an improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations: violations of the 1962 Laotian Accords, the problem of Cuba, and continued atomic testing.15
On April 3 and April 11 Khrushchev and Kennedy had exchanged secret letters, still not declassified, that concerned Cuba.16 At the same time a highly-publicized meeting of eight Presidiu
m members without Khrushchev prompted rumors that Khrushchev would soon be ousted. Then on April 11 the leading hard-liner, Frol Kozlov, suffered a near-fatal seizure; and disappeared forever from Soviet politics. Khrushchev met the next day with Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review. and passed the informal message that he was ready for a "fresh start" with Kennedy.17 Kennedy received Cousins at the White House on April 22, and Harriman left for Moscow soon after to meet Khrushchev. Fidel Castro also left on April 26 for the Soviet Union at Khrushchev’s invitation.
On April 21 and again on April 24, shortly before he left, Castro told Lisa Howard of ABC that the "U.S. limitations on exile raids" were "a proper step toward accommodation."18 On her return to the United States, Lisa Howard told CIA officials that Castro
was "looking for a way to reach a rapprochement," probably for economic reasons. She thought Guevara and Raúl Castro would oppose an accommodation, but both [René] Vallejo [Castro’s doctor] and [Raúl] Roa [the Foreign Minister] favored negotiations. Castro gave her the impression that he was ready to talk with "proper progressive spokesmen," though Kennedy would probably have to make the first move.19
An edited version of Howard’s report appeared on ABC on May 10.
The simultaneous convergence on Moscow of Harriman and Castro was thus preceded by hopeful signals that progress in accommodation between them could be brokered by Khrushchev (who had every’ motive vis-a-vis his own hard-liners to be successful in this respect). Soon afterwards the right-wing journalists Roben Allen and Paul Scott, who had excellent sources in military intelligence, wrote a column under the provocative title, "Did Harriman Meet Castro in Russia?" They reported that the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, chaired by the pro-military Senator John Stennis, was investigating the allegation that the two men had met "around April 28, in either Moscow or Murmansk" (where both were visiting). Castro allegedly was seeking diplomatic recognition in exchange for a reduction in Soviet troop levels. The article was placed by a right-wing Congressman in the Congressional Record?20
Though inadequate to demonstrate that such a face-to-face meeting occurred, the article (together with the reprinting of it in the Congressional Record) is an important symptom of the political opposition developing in Washington to the process of accommodation.