Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics
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FitzGerald’s assistant Samuel Halpern. an important witness to whom we shall return, later told the authors of the I.G. Report that the plan was abandoned as "impracticable" and "overtaken by events."69 Significantly he did not apparently mention to them what critics called
the most elementary considerations—for example that it [i.e. the suit] was in effect a gift from the United States, while the idea was to keep it secret; or, then again, Donovan’s feelings about being the gift-giver in this plot. If he wasn’t let in on the plot, after all, he might try on the suit himself.70
We can sec the same CIA antipathy to the accommodation track in October 1963: Helms and FitzGerald offered FitzGerald as a personal representative of Robert Kennedy, at a time when Robert had authorized an accommodation initiative from which the CLA was being excluded. More crudely put. they chose unilaterally to represent him, precisely at a time when they could not know what he wanted, or was up to; a time when there was a distinction and potential divergence between CIA and Kennedy interests.
That the CIA was well aware of this distinction is unconsciously revealed in 1976 by Samuel Halpern. In testimony to the Schweiker-Hart Subcommittee, Halpern discounted the danger that the Fitzgerald-Cubela meeting "exposed the CIA to possible embarrassment, because Fitzgerald had not used his real name and, therefore, AMLASH would have been unable to identify Fitzgerald as a CIA officer."71
Only Robert Kennedy would be embarrassed, in other words. This indeed would seem to be the most rational intention of such an unprofessional and disloyal meeting. Both Kennedys were lending support to explorations which promised (or alternatively, threatened) to lead to an accommodation with Castro. Those initiatives could only be harmed by FitzGerald’s discussion of assassinating Castro with a suspected leaker or double-agent, while pretending, falsely, to be a representative of Robert Kennedy.
The same Samuel Halpern has argued that the CIA, far from being disloyal to Robert Kennedy in this operation, had in fact gained his explicit approval informally. In the words of John Davis,
Since Kennedy and FitzGerald often met socially and at work, there was no need for formal authorization. The attorney general’s approval could just as easily have been conveyed informally and be far less risky for all concerned. This opinion was confirmed by former CIA official, Samuel Halpern. who in 1963 had been executive assistant to the Task Force on Cuba and one of the four men directly involved in the AM/LASH operation. In an interview on November 18, 1983, Mr. Halpern told me that he was absolutely certain that "Des" FitzGerald "had full authorization from Attorney General Kennedy and President Kennedy to proceed with the AM/LASH plot against Castro," adding that he always felt that since they often met socially, Bobby Kennedy and "Des" FitzGerald conducted most of their business together at Washington cocktail parties and receptions, rather than in their respective offices.72
But Halpern and Davis seem to have missed the point. It is indeed clear that the CIA had authorization to proceed with the political initiative. But that it had authorization to involve Robert Kennedy’s name and authority in an assassination plot, at a time when the Kennedys were attempting to open discussions with Castro, is virtually unimaginable. Both FitzGerald and Helms later denied that the AMLASH operation contemplated assassination.73 In this case Kennedy’s authorization for AMLASH would have been limited to what they described it as, an attempt to find a group to replace Castro.
From this point on the AMLASH initiative had the looks of an anti-Kennedy provocation. This was Attwood’s retrospective evaluation of the FitzGerald/AMLASH meetings: "One thing was clear: Stevenson was right when he told me back in September that ‘the CIA is in charge of Cuba’; or anyway, acted as if it thought it was, and to hell with the president it was pledged to serve."74 It would get worse.
Economics Versus the Larger Agenda of Accommodation
But the CIA was not necessarily acting as a rogue elephant. In these diverging paths of accommodation and provocation, Attwood, the Kennedys, and Harriman may have been much more isolated than the CIA. Bundy told Attwood on November 5 that the President was more interested than the State Department in exploring the Cuban overtures.75 A State Department memo two days later seemed to confirm this: in contrast to the President’s three conditions for accommodation, it called on Cuba to "renounce Marxism-Leninism as its ideology, remove Communists from positions of influence, provide compensation for expropriated properties and restore private enterprise in manufacturing, mining, oil and distribution."76 This detailed list made it clear that at least the oil and mining interests in Cuba (Exxon, Freeport Sulphur, etc.) continued to enjoy their usual influence on the formation of State Department foreign policy.
They were of course powerful in Congress as well. In 1963 the President, according to Ted Sorensen, "opposed an effort in the Congress to impose as the first condition to our dealing with a new Cuba its compensation of those Americans whose property had been expropriated by Castro."77
The President’s policy was dictated by geopolitics, not economics. A White House memo from Bundy for Attwood on November 12 reiterated that the only "flatly unacceptable" points in Castro’s policy were Cuba’s submission to external Communist influence and his subversion directed at the rest of Latin America.78 It is obvious that, in this inattention to economic compensation, it was the White House that threatened to diverge from traditional foreign policy priorities.
It is possible that the President, and Harriman, had a larger agenda that dictated this divergence. They sought accommodation, not just with Cuba, but above all with the Soviet Union; and a possible formula for achieving this was a reduction of troop levels, not just by the Soviet Union in Cuba, but also by the Americans in Vietnam.79
It is not clear to what extent Khrushchev had agreed to his part in such an agenda. In October Joseph Alsop reported that Khrushchev had assured Harriman in Moscow all Soviet troops would eventually leave Cuba. At his October 31 press conference, Kennedy said that "the numbers have steadily been reduced." A week later he reportedly said that he expected "nearly all of them to be out by the end of the year."80 No commentator seems to have observed that the usual American estimate of these numbers, 17,500 troops, roughly equalled the number of troops introduced by Kennedy into Vietnam. (Half of them had arrived in 1963, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, at a time when the Vietnam War was officially said to be going well.)81 The makings of a quid-pro-quo were certainly there.
In his pursuit of this larger agenda of accommodation, the President may have had a slightly different agenda from even his own brother. Schlesinger’s generally insightful account of these final months of the Kennedy Presidency has one striking omission: it fails to note the October escalation of sabotage operations:
On October 3, 1963, the Special Group approved nine operations in Cuba, several of which involved sabotage. On October 24, 1963, thirteen major sabotage operations, including the sabotage of an electric power plant, an oil refinery, and a sugar mill, were approved for the period from November 1963 through January 1964. (Memorandum, 7/11/75, CIA Review Staff to Select Committee, on "Approved CLA Covert Operations into Cuba")82
If the aim of these raids was to balance carrots with sticks, the results were counterproductive. The Comandos Mambises raid of October 21, 1963, almost certainly contributed to Castro’s long delay in meeting Jean Daniel.83
The President’s 1APA Speech and Its Twofold Consequences
After three weeks of impasse on both the Attwood and Daniel fronts, the President went public with his conditions for accommodation. Flying to Miami on November 18, he delivered to the Inter-American Press Association a speech which, in the Kennedy style, offered something to both the hawks and doves in his audience. As such, it divided aides then, as it still continues to divide scholars. Thomas G. Paterson has recently characterized it as a "tough-minded speech:" "The president, according to his aide McGeorge Bundy, sought to ‘encourage anti-Castro elements within Cuba to revolt’ and to ‘indicate that we would not permit an
other Cuba in the hemisphere."84 Michael Beschloss, citing Kennedy’s top speech-writer Ted Sorensen, presents it as "a speech that would open a door to the Cuban leader."85
The speech itself seems to have been carefully drafted to justify both of these conflicting contentions. Its appeal to reject forces from outside the hemisphere could be responded to by either Castro or his CIA-supported opposition. Thus the language was deliberately ambiguous to the point of duplicity. The President noted that the Alliance for Progress did "not dictate to any nation how to organize its economic life." But
It is important to restate what now divides Cuba from my country and from the other countries of the hemisphere. It is the fact that a small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. They have made Cuba a victim of foreign imperialism, an instrument of the policy of others, a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American republics. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible. . . .Once Cuban sovereignty has been restored we will extend the hand of friendship and assistance to a Cuba whose political and economic institutions have been shaped by the whole Cuban people.86
Quite clearly the President, unlike his own State Department, required no economic concessions for normalization. Instead "Cuban sovereignty" had to be "restored." This agenda could be accomplished by Castro himself, as the President had indicated to Daniel. Alternatively, Castro and the other "conspirators" could be ousted by the non-Communist AMTRUNK opposition.
The speech’s double message immediately energized both conflicting policy initiatives, the Attwood-Daniel accommodation track and the AMLASH provocation track. On November 19, the day after the President’s speech, Castro finally talked to Daniel, from 10 PM at night until four in the morning. He expressed great interest in what Daniel reported of his meeting with Kennedy, and asked for key phrases to be repeated. While refusing to retract past criticisms of Kennedy, Castro said that the Cubans could live with him, and that "anyone else would be worse." Castro added that he found "positive elements’’ in what Daniel had reported, and asked Daniel to prolong his stay so they could continue their discussions.87 Meanwhile, on November 18, Bundy told Attwood by telephone that the President wanted to see him, and instruct him on what to say to Castro, as soon as he returned from a "brief trip" to Texas.88
The CIA, at the same time, used the speech to urge on AMLASH, in a manner which, although unclep, seems quite conspiratorial.
The IAPA Speech, AMLASH, and Assassination
In 1975 Nestor Sanchez, the AMLASH case officer, told the Schweiker-Hart Subcommittee that he
met with AMLASH on November 22, 1963. At that meeting, the case officer referred to the President’s November 18 speech in Miami as an indication that the President supported a coup. That speech described the Castro government as a "small band of conspirators" which formed a "barrier" which "once removed" would ensure United States support for progressive goals in Cuba. The case officer told AMLASH that Fitzgerald had helped write the speech. The case officer also told AMLASH that explosives and rifles with telescopic sights would be provided. The case officer showed AMLASH [a] a poison pen and suggested he use the commercial poison, Black-Leaf 40 in it. . . .As AMLASH and the case officer broke up their meeting, they were told the President had been assassinated.89
Arthur M. Schlesinger, who himself had a hand in writing the speech, strongly denies that it was a green light for a coup, and doubts that FitzGerald helped write it. He writes that the speech "was meant in short as assistance to Attwood, not to FitzGerald;" but he fails to consider the very Kennedyesque probability that the speech was meant to assist both.90
The I.G. Report of 1967, discussing FitzGerald and the AMLASH operation, says nothing about the IAPA speech or FitzGerald’s alleged role in writing it. Richard N. Goodwin, the alleged principal author, is likewise silent in his memoir. Remembering America, which sums up Kennedy’s Cuba policy by referring to the Attwood initiative.91
On the other hand, FitzGerald’s interpretation of the speech was not only reasonable, it was the prevailing one at the time. The Associated Press called the speech "an appeal to the Cuban people to overthrow the Castro regime." The Ithaca Journal ran the story under the front-page banner headline, "KENNEDY URGES OVERTHROW OF CASTRO."92 Particularly significant, though less objective, was the informed comment of Hal Hendrix, a journalist whose CIA connections, later admitted to, have drawn critics’ attention for his suppressed role in the Oswald story.93 Inspired no doubt by his usual sources in the JM/WAVE station, Hendrix wrote that the crucial paragraph of the LAP A Speech "may have been meant for potential dissident elements in Castro’s armed forces [i.e. Cubela’s contacts] as well as for resistance groups in Cuba."94
In short those books are wrong which treat the IAPA Speech unilaterally as an olive branch to aid Attwood and Daniel.95 Equally wrong are those who see it as evidence of a unified Kennedy-CIA advocacy of rebellion.96 Like other speeches from late 1963, especially on Cuba, the Soviet Union and Vietnam, the speech is an example of calculated Kennedy doubletalk.
The Kennedy habit of speaking out of both sides of the mouth at once, like the larger Kennedy habit of trying to please both hawks and doves simultaneously, can be criticized as a defect of leadership, even of character.97 The weakness that led to such ambiguity may well have contributed to the Kennedys’ downfall, for it maximized frustration and mistrust within a divided Administration.
But the political schizophrenia expressed by such doubletalk was not just personal, it was national. If the Kennedys failed to speak or to pursue a single policy on Cuba, we must take into account the hurricane of dissenting voices in Congress, and manipulators inside the Administration, that made it virtually impossible to do so.
The CIA, reinforced by powerful forces in the media and corporate world, was becoming particularly manipulative in its massaging of the AMLASH operation into an assassination initiative. As we shall see in the next chapter, there is a deep CIA secret surrounding the November 22 meeting with AMLASH, which the l.G. Report of 1967 does more to conceal than reveal.
We must also consider the claim that the Kennedys had their own conspiratorial connection to the Giancana-Roselli-CIA plots against Castro, a connection the family and their friends still strive to conceal.98 We must look at E. Howard Hunt, a man whose known role in the AMLASH story may have played a key role in the Watergate intrigue.99 And above all we must look at a man whose behavior, and whose CIA watchers, were intertwined with the already complex Attwood-AMLASH-Hunt story. This man was Lee Harvey Oswald.
1 Hinckle and Turner, 195-96. The 1994 CIA releases have partially filled this gap, but only with respect to Agency operations.
2 Assassination Report, 87; LG. Report, 89.
3 Schweiker-Hart Report, 17n; Schorr, 165.
4 Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 639-40.
5 Beschloss, 640; citing Baltimore Sun, September 9, 1963.
6 Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 374-75.
7 U.S. Department of State, Bulletin, April 22, 1963; Stebbins, 279-80; and sources therein cited. Although the New York Times did not immediately carry this announcement, it reported on April 1 that fifteen exiles had been curbed by the Justice Department.
8 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 582; Fonzi, 121-22; Hinckle and Turner, 135, 155-56.
9 Hinckle and Turner, 164-67.
10 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 586 (CIA); Hinckle and Turner, 154-56 (Bishop).
11 Beschloss, 583-84.
12 Assassinations Report, 173.
13 Assassinations Repon, 170-71; Beschloss, 96.
14 Beschloss. The Crisis Years. 584-88 (Khrushchev); Summers. 421 (Kennedy).
15 Beschloss, 592-93; Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, ¡891-1986 (New York: William Morrow, 1992). 594.
16 Beschloss. 584-85, 777. It has been suggested that Kennedy’s "Peace Speech" at American University on June 10. 1963, was based partly on ideas agreed to in this secret correspondence (U.S. News and World Report, July 22, 1963).
17 Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 586-87.
18 CIA debriefing of Lisa Howard. May 1, 1963. in RFK Papers; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Ballentine, 1978), 584, Roben E Quirk. Fidel Castro (New York: W.W. Nonon, 1993), 458; Beschloss. The Crisis Years, 594-95
19 Quirk, 458
20 Washington World, placed by Congressman Bnjce Alger in Congressional Record. June 12, 1963, A3785-86.
21 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 580.
22 William Attwood, The Twilight Struggle (New York Harper and Row, 1987), 254.
23 CIA Memo of 14 Feb 1977, "AMTRUNK Operation, Interim Working Draft," 1.
24 CIA Memo of 14 Feb 1977, Tadeusz (Tad) Witold Szulc." 6; WAVE Dispatch 17410 of 20 Aug 1964, 9-11.
25 WAVE Dispatch 8351 of 5 April 1963.
26 CIA Memo of 14 Feb 1977, "AMTRUNK Operation, Interim Working Draft," 2, 4.
27 Ibid.
28 CIA Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 23 May 1967, 95, 96; cf. 79, 101.
29 CIA Memo of 14 Feb 1977, "Nestor Antonio Moreno Lopez," 3; NARA ID number 1993.07.21.18:28:44:840470, Box JFK36, F16.
30 David Com, Blond Ghost, 102. David Com, a Nation editor, volunteers that "Shackley’s instincts were right" about AMTRUNK and "other harebrained projects."
31 Assassination Report, 173.
32 Monis Morley, Imperial State and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 153.
33 10 AH 77, 140.
34 Morley, 153; Hinckle and Turner, 137-44.
35 Assassination Report, 86n; citing AM/LASH Case Officer #1, 8/11/75.
36 I.G. Report, 95, 96; cf. 101.