There was a television in the hospital room, and now Silvia, too, saw pictures of Oswald. “Annie and I looked at one another and sort of gasped,” she told the author, “She said, ‘Do you recognize him?’ She said, ‘It is the same guy, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes, but do not say anything.’ ”
The sisters were frightened, worried that their encounter with “Oswald” and his two companions had somehow placed them in danger. With their parents far away in Cuba in Castro’s prisons, they felt very much alone. Silvia suffered from a physical condition that frequently caused blackouts when she was under stress—as when she learned of the assassination. Annie was a scared girl of seventeen. They decided to say nothing to the authorities of their disquieting experience, which only became known purely by chance, when another Odio sister mentioned it to an American friend.
A series of casual conversations finally brought the incident to the attention of the FBI, which at first expressed little interest. The matter was not pursued with vigor until the following summer, when the Warren Commission’s work was well advanced. When there was a serious follow-up, it emerged that there was every reason to believe the sisters’ account—not least when it emerged that she had discussed it with another witness before the assassination. Evidence was available, too, that she had reported the incident—again before the assassination—in a letter to her father in Cuba. Coupled with the fact that not only Silvia but Annie recalled the visit and said the mysterious American had resembled Oswald, the information was impossible to ignore.
“Mrs. Odio has been checked out thoroughly …” Warren Commission attorney David Slawson was to write. “The evidence is unanimously favorable, both as to her character and reliability and as to her intelligence.” His colleague Wesley Liebeler wrote—as to whether Oswald was at Odio’s home—“Odio may well be right. The Commission will look bad if it turns out that she is.” To Slawson, Odio was “the most significant witness linking Oswald to anti-Castro Cubans.”
There was a problem, though, one that the Warren Commission never resolved. While the actual date of Odio’s encounter was never pinned down, investigation focused on the period September 24 and 29—in particular the middle of that time frame. This was a period when the authentic Oswald was ending his stay in New Orleans and setting off for Mexico City. He could not have been at Odio’s apartment, by any account of his movements, unless he had been flitting around the country not by bus—the way he reached Mexico City—but by some other very speedy form of transport. There was no evidence that Oswald had traveled by commercial airline.
Nevertheless, the Odio evidence remained troubling. In the dying days of the Commission, Chief Counsel Lee Rankin wrote to FBI Director Hoover, “It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs. Odio’s allegations either be proved or disproved.” On September 21, 1964, as the Warren Report was being finalized, Hoover reported that his agents had traced a man named Loran Hall, a “participant in numerous anti-Castro activities,” who said he had been in Dallas at the relevant time and had visited Silvia Odio along with two associates—Lawrence Howard and William Seymour. Hall said one of his friends looked like Oswald, and Hoover seemed satisfied that it was this resemblance that had led to all the fuss. On that basis, a last-minute passage was inserted in the Warren Report, implying that Odio’s account had been a matter of mistaken identity.
The FBI, however, had for a while withheld a crucial fact from the Commission. Faced with denials by his companions that they had been at the Odio sisters’ apartment, Hall had recanted his story. Then, when the FBI belatedly came clean—after the Warren Report had gone to press—the Commission, in turn, failed to include a correction in the volumes of evidence that accompanied the Report.
Analysis done in recent times, though, suggests a solution to the knotty question of when the Odios’ Oswald encounter occurred, and how it may have fit into Oswald’s known movements. In her first conversation with the FBI, Silvia Odio had herself dated the visit to the apartment as having occurred in “late September or early October.” In his 2008 book on the assassination, the historian David Kaiser suggested the date of the visit may well have been as late as October 3—a day Oswald had been not en route to Mexico City but arriving back in Dallas.
If Professor Kaiser is right, the possible implications of the anti-Castro trio’s visit to Silvia Odio—and the pointed statement to her that “Leon Oswald” believed that President Kennedy should be killed—becomes additionally ominous. For the local press had reported only days earlier that a presidential visit to Texas—including Dallas—was planned for the third week of November.
Kaiser may indeed be right in thinking that the Odio incident occurred on October 3. Hotel records showed that Loran Hall and two male companions were in Dallas that day. Hall, whose “explanation” of the Odio matter—shortlived though it was—served to relegate the matter to the Warren Commission’s trivia pile, deserves a closer look. He turned up again in 1967, when the New Orleans aspects of the assassination case were aired publicly, and again muddied the waters with information that led in useless directions. In 1977, he gave evidence to the Assassinations Committee only with great reluctance. When he eventually did so, on a basis that ensured that he could not be prosecuted as a result of anything arising from his testimony, he maintained that he had never claimed to have visited Silvia Odio. In its final Report, the Committee characterized his original tale as an “admitted fabrication.”
Hall, alias “Lorenzo Pascillo,” was a thirty-three-year-old former U.S. Army sergeant who reportedly had training in counterintelligence. He was also said to have trained Cuban exiles at a camp on Lake Pontchartrain outside New Orleans—the same camp to which Oswald had allegedly been taken at one point. Hall had gone to Havana in 1959, before the fall of the Batista dictatorship, to work in the casino of the Capri Hotel, which was controlled by Santo Trafficante, one of the Mafia leaders who has been named in connection with killing President Kennedy. After the fall of the regime, by Hall’s own account, he and Trafficante shared a Quonset hut in a Castro detention camp.
Notes of Hall’s interviews with congressional investigators indicate that the CIA made contact with him the day after his release and repatriation. A CIA document says the interest in Hall was solely “for debriefing.” His son, however, said in court testimony that his father was for many years a CIA operative.
The Odio encounter remains today an incident that cannot be ignored yet resists explanation. The House Assassinations Committee’s firm conclusion, however, was that it believed the Odio sisters and accepted that they had indeed met a man who had been introduced as Leon Oswald and looked like Oswald. It was, as a Committee report noted in fine understatement, “a situation that indicates possible conspiratorial involvement.”
What sort of involvement? If Oswald was a genuine pro-Castro leftist, as the Committee thought, what was he doing at Odio’s home in the company of anti-Castro activists? The Committee speculated—though without conviction—that Oswald, as part of a leftist assassination plot, perhaps associated with the exiles in order to implicate the anti-Castro side in the President’s murder. The other, contrary, interpretation, espoused by many researchers, is that anti-Castro operatives deliberately used Oswald, or the name of the real Oswald, to set him up as a fall guy for the assassination.14
Absent any certainty—except that the Odios’ account is credible, an unresolved part of the assassination story—we are left with the comments of two of the main protagonists.
“As it stands right now,” Loran Hall said in a taped 1977 interview, “there’s only two of us left alive—that’s me and Santo Trafficante. And as far as I’m concerned we’re both going to stay alive—because I ain’t going to say shit.”
Silvia Odio ended her interview with the author with a poignant thought. Asked what haunted her most about her experience all those years ago, she replied, “It is the thought that perhaps, somehow, I could have
prevented the assassination.”
Chapter 21
Countdown
“The Kennedys were playing with fire.”
—former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, on the brothers’ duplicity over Cuba, 1994
In the fall of 1963, at the very time Odio was introduced to Oswald in Dallas, President Kennedy made moves in secret that, if discovered—as they likely were—offered those violently opposed to Castro greater cause than ever to take drastic action. On September 19, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson phoned the President with news of a remarkable development. Tentatively, through an obscure African diplomat and others, Fidel Castro let it be known that he was interested in reaching some sort of accommodation with the United States.
The Cuban leader’s message, very different from his public rantings, had been passed on—over coffee at U.N. headquarters—to William Attwood, Special Adviser to the American delegation. Attwood had previously met and talked with Castro and was well regarded by Kennedy. The sense of the message, passed on by Guinea’s ambassador to Cuba, was that Castro was uneasy about the degree to which Cuba had become tied to the Soviet Union, was at odds with his own hardliners, and wanted to redress the balance by finding an accommodation with the United States. It sounded as though he wanted talks about talks.
This had the potential for breakthrough as momentous as, say, the first tentative contacts between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s. Kennedy responded rapidly, giving the go-ahead for contact between Attwood and Cuba’s delegate at the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga—on two conditions.1 First, it should not appear that the United States had solicited the discussions and, second, any contacts were to be secret.
“Secret” meant that only those with need to know should be told. Kennedy was already in conflict with those in his own cabinet who opposed talk of withdrawal from Vietnam, and with those who looked sourly on his policy of global disengagement. Going soft on Cuba, moreover, would enrage those at the CIA who had for years been passionately involved in the fight to topple Castro. “Unfortunately,” Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson told Attwood, “the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.” To some at the State Department, too, the very idea of accommodation was heresy. The President wanted to find out more about the Castro approach, but he wanted it done quietly and at arm’s length.
Attwood already had a willing go-between for the coming contacts with Havana. This was Lisa Howard, an ABC News reporter who had interviewed Castro in Havana—and, moreover, had a sexual dalliance with him. She had told the President about the trip—including the bedroom encounter—on her return. “She mentioned that Castro hadn’t taken his boots off,” recalled the author Gore Vidal, who knew both Kennedy and Howard, “Jack liked details like that.” Much more seriously, the reporter had gained the impression that Castro was ready to talk, and had come back and reported as much—eventually in print. Now, Attwood recruited Howard to help with his mission, promising an exclusive story should anything come of the contacts.
On September 23, the reporter engineered a cocktail party at her Manhattan apartment, to which Attwood and Lechuga were invited. At a discreet distance from other guests, the American and the Cuban talked cautiously for about half an hour. Lechuga indicated that progress might be possible, that Castro might want to meet with Attwood.
The following morning saw Attwood on an early shuttle to Washington, DC, and a meeting with Robert Kennedy, who agreed that contacts could be worthwhile. Then he and Lechuga met again. Through the month of October, as the days ticked by toward tragedy in Dallas, the secret diplomacy continued. Hoping to move things along, Attwood got the President to discuss Cuba with Jean Daniel, an eminent French journalist who was due soon to fly to Cuba to see Castro.
At their meeting, President Kennedy surprised Daniel by expressing vigorous approval for the basic principles of the Cuban revolution. The United States, he said, had been to blame for many of the evils of the old Batista regime. While warning that he would not tolerate Cuban subversion in Latin America, the President said he now “understood the Cubans.” He asked Daniel to come to see him again on his return, following the upcoming visit to Cuba, to brief him on his exchanges with Castro. Daniel was being used, he realized, as an “unofficial envoy.”
Meanwhile, Attwood’s secret diplomacy seemed to be getting somewhere. Castro’s trusted aide and personal physician, Rene Vallejo, suggested through Lisa Howard that Attwood fly to a one-on-one meeting with Castro at Varadero, on Cuba’s north coast.
On November 5, a recently released White House tape shows, Kennedy and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy discussed how to move the matter forward. The President suggested getting Attwood “off the payroll,” so that—if leaked—any contact with Castro could appear unofficial, “deniable.” The President was interested, Attwood noted in his diary, in the possibility of “taking Castro “out of the Soviet fold … perhaps wiping out the Bay of Pigs and getting back to normal.”
The administration was playing a dangerous double game. A previous chapter of this book reviewed the likelihood that the Kennedy brothers had been aware of plans to kill Castro earlier in the presidency.2 Through the fall of 1963, in the very weeks Kennedy was authorizing a dialogue with Castro, CIA officers again met with Castro’s aide Rolando Cubela, whom the Agency believed—mistakenly—to be a traitor set on the regime’s overthrow.
Several times in early September, Cubela and his CIA case officer Nestor Sanchez—who answered to the head of Cuba operations, Desmond FitzGerald—met at a safe house in Brazil. In early October they met again in France, at a house outside Paris. On October 11, Sanchez reported that Cubela wanted Robert Kennedy’s personal assurance that the United States would support “any activity” he might undertake against Castro. On October 29, FitzGerald himself flew to Paris and, representing himself as Robert Kennedy’s personal emissary, told Cubela that Washington would back any anti-Communist group that would “neutralize” the Cuban leadership. He and Cubela also discussed what weapon might be used to kill Castro, and Fitzgerald later approved weapons being provided.3
There is no compelling reason to think that these CIA officers acted, as Kennedy loyalists have maintained, without authority.4 Documents and interviews made public since 2005 seem to indicate that there was also another plan in the works, one that envisaged a coup utilizing a second supposed traitor in Castro’s government apparatus. The game plans, both for the Cubela operation and for the second alleged plot, envisaged Castro being killed.5
Could there really have been duplicity on such a breathtaking scale? Did the Kennedys open a peace parley with Castro while simultaneously pressing ahead with murderous schemes to get rid of him? In a 1994 interview, former Kennedy Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the author that he had learned of the coup planning—after the assassination—from the committee in the National Security Council that was working on it.” That is, from the Special Group, effectively directed by Robert Kennedy. “There’s no particular contradiction there,” Rusk said. “It was just an either/or situation. That went on frequently.” The Kennedy brothers, he said, had been “playing with fire.”
If Castro discovered he was being two-timed—and that seems overwhelmingly likely, given that Cubela seems to have remained loyal—how would he respond? And what if one of the more virulent anti-Castro exile factions (and perhaps some of their CIA backers) learned of—and believed to be real and ongoing—the peace feelers between Kennedy and Castro? How would they react? When briefed by Attwood on the status of the dialogue with the Cubans, Robert Kennedy had voiced concern about security. It was, he feared, “bound to leak.”
The risk was surely greater than the Kennedys knew, and increasing with every week that passed. The CIA had known for months about Lisa Howard and her information on Castro’s comments about a possible rapprochement—she had talked with Agency officials following her return from Cuba. Yet it was Howard whom Attwood used
when in late October, wishing to maintain momentum, he sought to get a message through to Castro. From her New York City apartment, Howard made a string of calls to Castro’s aide Vallejo in Cuba. Then Attwood himself tried calling from Howard’s phone. Getting through meant hours of loose talk on vulnerable open lines.
This was a naïve way of going about a mission that was supposed to be secret. The CIA had long since succeeded in placing agents hostile to Cuba inside the Cuban mission to the United Nations headed by Carlos Lechuga, who of course knew about Attwood’s work. Making overseas calls in those days, moreover, involved going through an operator—an insecure procedure. The National Security Agency intercepted calls to Havana, and other U.S. intelligence agencies reaped the informational harvest.6
“I think the CIA must have known about this initiative,” Arthur Schlesinger, former Kennedy Special Assistant and the presidency’s preeminent chronicler, told the author. “They must certainly have realized that Bill Attwood and the Cuban representative to the U.N. were doing more than exchanging daiquiri recipes… . They had all the wires tapped at the Cuban delegation to the United Nations.” On at least one of Lisa Howard’s calls to Havana, Attwood was to recall, she said the President was personally committed to the ongoing contacts.
“If the CIA did find out what we were doing,” Attwood said he realized later, that could have “trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles, and the more gung-ho CIA people who had been involved since the Bay of Pigs. If word of a possible normalization of relations with Cuba leaked to these people, I can understand why they would have reacted so violently. This was the end of their dreams of returning to Cuba, and they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the President.”
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 33