Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics
Page 13
37 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 510-11; cf. 514. Fidelismo sin Fidel was originally Manolo Ray’s phrase to describe his own political program (Hugh Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 508). See Chapter VI.
38 HinckJe and Turner, 153, 342. (Haig was appointed to his position under Vance on June 28, 1963.) The CIA lost this bureaucratic battle to the U.S. Army, which in 1964 took over the CIA’s Special Operations Group (SOG) in Vietnam, along with its Green Berets.
39 I.G Repon, 86.
40 Memo of Richard Helms. Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, for Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "CIA Involvement in Counter-Revolutionary Acoviues.’’ 7 Mar 1966. para. 2.
41 Assassination Report, 173; quoting Helms testimony to Church Committee, 6/13/75, 131, 117.
42 New York Times. September 9, 1963; Quirk. 480.
43 Assassination Report, 173.
44 Quirk, 473-75, 477. In 1965 Guevara traveled to China, before returning to by-pass Soviet line Communist parties in Latin America with guerrilla groups using Maoist tactics (Quirk, 518, 523).
45 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle. 258; Schweiker-Hart Report, 20; citing William Attwood testimony, 7/10/75.
46 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 264.
47 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle,, 258-59.
48 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 258-59; Assassinations Report, 173-74; Hinckle and Turner, 196.
49 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 248-51.
50 Quirk. 445.
51 Quirk, 457 (Howard); Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 594 (Attwood).
52 Bcschloss, 638.
53 John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 279-82; cf. Chapter III.
54 Beschloss, 638-39. These three conditions were roughly those outlined as policy objectives in Attwood’s original memo which he submitted to Harriman on September 18.
55 Quirk. 481; William Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks (New York: 1967), 142-43.
56 Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks, 143. In his second book Attwood revealed that "Stevenson had asked me for t draft of a reply" (Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 260). He did not mention that in the speech Stevenson demanded that Castro let the people "exercise the right of self-determination through free elections" (Quirk, 480).
57 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy. 596-97.
58 I.G. Report, 87-88
59 I.G. Report, 88-89.
60 I.G Report. 89.
61 Assassination Report, 87.
62 I.G. Report, 89.
63 I.G. Report, 90.
64 Summers, 351.
65 I.G. Report, 84 (inability); Schweiker-Hart Report. 17n (warnings).
66 Ibid.
67 Schlesinger. Robert Kennedy, 583-84.
68 Assassination Report, 85-86; I.G. Report, 75. FitzGerald told the I.G. Report authors that the plot began after be took over the SAS staff in January 1963. The Church Committee considered it "likely that the activity took place earlier, since Donovan had completed his his negotiations by the middle of January 1963" (Assassination Report, But the premise for this conclusion was obviously incorrect.
69 I.G. Report, 75.
70 Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets (New York: Knopf, 1979). 150. The fact that Donovan and Castro planned to dive together may possibly have inspired FitzGerald’s famous plan to kill Castro with an exploding sea-shell (Assassination Report, 87, 1.G. Report. 77). Samuel Ha]pern told Thomas Powers that he "protested the teashell plan. . . .Castro blowing up on the ocean floor would point a finger directly at the United States" (Powers, 150). Once again, there is no trace of such protest in the l.G. Report, which has this to say: "FitzGerald states that he, Sam Halpern, and [redacted] had several sessions at which they explored this possibility, but that no one else was ever brought in on the talks. Halpern believes that he had conversations with TSD on feasibility. . . ." (l.G. Report, 77). Halpern’s protest was first recorded after FitzGerald had died in July 1967.
71 Schweiker-Hart Report, 17n; citing Executive Officer testimony, 4/22/76, 55); emphasis added.
72 John Davis. The Kennedy’s (New York. McGraw-Hill. 1985), 495.
73 Assassination Report, 87
74 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 263.
75 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 261; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 597.
76 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 597.
77 Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 723.
78 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 597.
79 Cf. Scott, Deep Politics, 225.
80 Beschloss, 657.
81 Scott (1972), 227-28.
82 Assassinations Report, 173. (Note however the late date and addressee of the cited memo.)
83 Hinckle and Turner, 139 (raid).
84 Thomas G. Paterson, Containing Castro (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), 261; citing Bundy, "Meeting With the President," Dec. 19, 1963, Box 19, Aides Files-Bundy, NSF, LBJL. An internal CIA memo of December 9 appears to have interpreted the President’s speech the same way (Schweiker-Hart Report, 20n).
85 Beschloss, 659; citing Sorensen. Kennedy, 723. Sorensen’s actual characterization of the speech, though balanced and ambiguous like the speech itself, seems to tilt rather towards the Bundy reading. According to Sorensen, the speech reminded the "Cuban people" of "the freedoms. . . and the American aid which would be forthcoming once they broke with Moscow."
86 Public Papers of the Presidents. Kennedy, 1963, 876.
87 The two men met again on November 22. and heard together of the President’s murder. Es una mala noticia, Castro muttered over and over: This is bad news." Jean Daniel, New Republic, December 7,14, 1963; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 598-99; Quirk, 482-83.
88 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 262; Beschloss. 659, Quirk. 183.
89 Schweiker-Hart Report, 19-20. Nestor Sanchez’ name, generally redacted out of the declassified I.G. Report, was allowed to remain on pages 77a and 100.
90 Schlesinger. Robert Kennedy, 598n: "On its face the passage was obviously directed against Castro’s extracontinental ties and signaled that, if these were ended, normalization was possible; it was meant in short as assistance to Attwood, not to FitzGerald This was the signal that Richard Goodwin, the chief author of the speech, meant to convey. A search of the JFK Papers shows that Goodwin, Ralph Dungan, Bundy, Gordon Chase of Bundy’s staff and I were involved in discussions about the speech. No evidence was uncovered of any contribution from FitzGerald and the CIA (W.W. Moss to author. March 30, 1978)."
91 Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America ZZ: "By the end of 1963, Kennedy would begin secret discussions with officials of the Cuban government, hoping to lay the foundation for a meeting with Castro and a peaceful solution to the ‘Cuban problem.’" It is surprising that Goodwin should be recorded as the principal author of the IAPA Speech, since by his own account he moved after the 1962 Missile Crisis from State to the Peace Corps.
92 Ithaca Journal, November 19, 1963; Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, 343.
93 For Hendrix and Oswald, see below, p. 96; Seth Kantor, The Ruby Cover-Up (New York: Zebra, 1978), 373-82. Hendrix himself played a part in what may have been the key 1963 assassination plot against Castro, the AM-TILT Bayo-Pawley raid (Scott, Deep Politics, 114-17; cf. Hinckle and Turner, 169).
94 Hal Hendrix, Miami Herald, November 20, 1963; reprinted by Cong. Bob Wilson in Congressional Record, November 20, 1963, A7190.
95 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 598n; Beschloss. 659. Cf. Daniel Schorr, 166: "At the November 22 meeting Fitzgerald [i.e. Sanchez] called attention to [the IAPA speech]. That, he told Cubela, was the signal of the President’s support for a coup. It was a gross distortion of a speech in which Kennedy had actually extended a hand of friendship to Castro on condition the Cuban regime cease subversive efforts in other West Hemisphere countries."
96 Paterson, 261; Hurt, 343.
97 Richard Reeves, A Question of Character (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1992), 278.
98 Davis, The Kennedys, 348-53; Reeves, 262.
99 Hinckle and Turner, 240, 299-306.
&n
bsp; VI. AMLASH, THE I.G. REPORT, AND OSWALD (THE INSPECTOR GENERAL’S REPORT: AN INTRODUCTION)
August 1994
The Inspector General’s Report of 1967 on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro is probably the most important CIA document ever released by the Agency. The document that neither Johnson nor (apparently) Nixon was allowed to see in its entirety, despite their asserted interest, the document so tightly held that only a single ribbon copy was retained even within the CIA, is now available to everyone.
Many of the IG Report’s most important revelations have been known for two decades, but the release of the full text is nonetheless important. Although many of its key statements were transmitted by Congressional Committees in the 1970s, the document as a whole tells us far more than any of its parts. It is informative in what it chooses to tell us about the CIA’s conscious collaboration with (its phrase) the "criminal underworld" (p. 15). But it is also informative in the facts which it strives to disguise or suppress. These include key events in the immediate context of President Kennedy’s assassination.
The IG Report was the result of an investigation ordered in 1967 by President Johnson, after a Drew Pearson-Jack Anderson column of March 7, 1967, had published for the first time details of "a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro."1 However Johnson never got to see the actual report: Helms merely spoke to him from a set of notes which excluded the key events of late 1963. President Nixon never got to see it either, although it would appear that he had his aide John Ehrlichman try over many months to pry it out of CIA Director Richard Helms.2
The Report’s story of CIA-underworld assassination murder plots will startle no one in the 1990s. In 1967 it was so explosive as to be virtually unmentionable in the public arena for another eight years. Even the Anderson column, which told only a small part of what Anderson would eventually reveal, was published four days late by the Washington Post, by which time the column’s references to the recruitment of "underworld figures" had been edited out, presumably after checking with the CIA. We shall see that a follow-up column by Jack Anderson in 1971 was likewise edited. Not until the 1975 reports from the Rockefeller Commission and the Senate Church Committee did the press treat the story of CIA-mafia murder plots as more than a wild left-wing allegation.
And if that story is by now familiar, there is still plenty more in the IG Report to engage and even shock ordinary readers in the 1990s. I shall focus on four major issues:
1) The CIA’s conscious efforts to restore organized crime elements, including drug traffickers, to their traditional position of influence in Cuba.
2) The CIA’s pronounced hostility to presidential policy directives and controls, including its willingness to act controversially without consultation in the Kennedys’ name.
3) The indications that the CIA’s AMLASH assassination project in 1963 was designed to frustrate a presidentially authorized exploration of accommodation with Castro, in a project from which the CIA had been excluded.
4) The IG Report’s total and suspicious evasion of the major question raised by the unedited Anderson column: that the CIA’s plots against Castro had possibly "backfired" in such a way as to cause the president’s murder.
In the interests of expanding the boundaries of what we now know, I shall focus on some of the limitations of the Report. This is not meant to discredit it as a significant source of historical information Even when I talk below of misrepresentations in the IG Report, one can assume that much of this came from key witnesses (such as Sheffield Edwards) who had clearly something to hide, rather than originating with the Report’s authors. But on the fourth topic (the murder of JFK) we find more continuous evasion and false logic, enough to raise questions about the purpose of the Report itself.
CIA-Underworid Plots and the Restoration of Organized Crime to Power in Cuba
Perhaps the most astonishing section of the IG Report tells the story of how the CIA allied itself with those whose motives (the FBI had warned them) were to re-establish the pre-Castro Cuban drug traffic. More specifically, the CIA was guided by the advice of mafia leader Santos Trafficante, and entrusted the assassination plot to Tony Varona, the Cuban leader of their own political creation for the Bay of Pigs, the Democratic Revolutionary Front:
Varona was the head of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, [redacted] pan of the larger Cuban operation. [CIA officer Jim] O’Connell understood that Varona was dissatisfied [redacted].
(Comment [by CIA]: Reports from the FBI suggest how Trafficante may have known of Varona. On 21 December 1960 the Bureau forwarded to the Agency a memorandum reporting that efforts were being made by U.S. racketeers to finance anti-Castro activities in hopes of securing the gambling, prostitution, and dope monopolies in Cuba in the event Castro was overthrown. A later report of 18 January 1961 associates Varona with those schemes. Varona had hired Edward K. Moss, a Washington public relations counselor, as a fund raiser and public relations adviser. The Bureau report alleged that Moss’ mistress was one Julia Cellini, whose brothers represented two of the largest gambling casinos in Cuba.) (29-30)
Comment by PDS: one of these was Meyer Lansky’s Tropicana, where the manager was first Dino Cellini and then his and Jack Ruby’s mutual friend Lewis McWillie, who arranged Ruby’s mysterious trips to Cuba in 1959.3 Then Dino and Eddie Cellini (with a third brother, Goffredo or Girodino Cellini) managed the casino at Lansky’s $14 million dream palace, the Riviera, which opened in 1957. Thanks to the presence of top international couriers like Giuseppe de Giorgio, Havana casinos served as way-stations in the transfer of large heroin shipments from Europe to the United States.4
According to the IG Report,
The Cellini brothers were believed to be in touch with Varona through Moss and were reponed to have offered Varona large sums of money for his operations against Castro, with the understanding that they would receive privileged treatment ‘in the Cuba of the future.’ Attempts to verify these reports were unsuccessful.5 (There is a record of CIA interest in Moss, but there is no indication that the Agency had any involvement with him in connection with Cuba. [Long redaction]. . . ). (29-30)
I shall argue later that the most sustained misrepresentation in the IG Report is this pretense that the CIA did not understand (or could not "verify" reports on) the complex crime world others (like the FBI) were telling it about. However, even taken at face value, it is a shock to see the IG Report’s lack of hypocritical surprise or concern about an FBI report that the CIA’s efforts to install Varona in the place of Castro would serve the purposes of those mobsters who had "hopes of securing the gambling, prostitution, and dope monopolies in Cuba." Apparently it was accepted that the CIA’s efforts would have the effect of restoring the tyranny of the U.S. mob in Cuba, whose presence had been one of the chief factors mobilizing Cuban middle-class revulsion against Batista.
On reflection, this should appear brazen, but not surprising. The mob had functioned as enforcers of U.S. interests in Cuba since the repeal in 1934 of the Platt Amendment which had "legalized" U.S. interventions in Cuba. Their corruption of Cuban politicians like Carlos Prio Socarras (Varona’s patron), or Fulgencio Batista helped reduce these men (whatever their original ambitions) to the role of docile feeders at the U.S. capitalistic trough.
There may have been politics behind the March 1961 decision of the CIA’s Office of Security to follow Traffi cante’s guidance and give a murder role to Varona. At the time Varona’s influence in the Frente had been undercut by the incoming Kennedy Administration’s stated preference for younger and less reactionary political leaders, notably the young engineer Manolo Ray, who had served briefly as a Minister under Castro. Bowing to the inevitable, senior CIA officials like Richard Bissell had made this leftward adjustment. After removing the right-wing Howard Hunt as the Frente’s political liaison, on March 22 they appointed the more neutral Miro Cardona to be head of the CIA’s "provisional government," with Ray and Varona as his lieutenants.6
The
political difference between Varona and Ray was significant, at least from the point of view of the CIA. Varona was explicitly in favor of restoring the land, banks, and industries that had been nationalized under Castro to their original owners; Ray (whose political slogan was Fidelismo sin Fidel) accepted this part of the Castro revolution.7
Trafficante as well as Varona could correctly interpret the Kennedys’ leftward move towards Ray as a threat to their influence in a post-Castro Cuba. Varona’s and Trafficante’s interests were not identical—indeed Varona had once denounced mob influence in Cuba—but Varona in exile depended on the funds and other resources of the mob-tainted Prio. The even more right-wing ideologue Hunt preferred the young Catholic leader Manuel Artime over Varona; and in January took steps to counter a leftward shift of the Frente by increasing the status of Artime (who by now was a Varona ally) in the CIA invasion force.8 All three men, Varona, Trafficante, and Hunt, had reasons to oppose the Kennedy-backed forces of social democracy.
O’Connell’s decision to involve Varona in a sensitive and central murder operation, at a time when his status and influence in the Bay of Pigs Operation was diminishing, reflects at a minimum the kind of bureaucratic inertia that has made the CIA such a reactionary force throughout the Third World. But what are we to make of his decision to do so without seeking guidance from Bissell or higher authority? Other considerations suggest that his decision, like Hunt’s promotion of Artime, and indeed the whole CIA-mafia collaboration to kill Castro, was not just insensitive to the Kennedys’ political directives but consciously and actively opposed to them.
The CIA’s Hostility to the Policies and Directives of the Kennedys
Under the guidance of Kennedy aides Richard Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger, the New Frontier was a perceived threat to those like Varona and Hunt (and presumably O’Connell) who wished to return Cuban politics to the status quo ante. Also threatening was Robert Kennedy’s avowed opposition to mob political influence, whether in Cuba or in the United States.
It is important to understand that CLA-underworld collaboration was an established and continuing mode of operation going back to the suppression of Sicilian and French Communism after World War II.9 The Kennedy family had their own well-established mob connections, dating back to Joseph Kennedy’s liquor operations during and after prohibition.10 Almost certainly the mob helped elect Kennedy in 1960, as it has frequently helped to elect Presidents (and more importantly advance them through the primaries) before and since.11