The Corporation

by T. J. English

  The money and pills were delivered at a meeting between Mahue, Trafficante, Roselli, and Tony Varona at a room in the Fontainebleau Hotel. Many years later, at the hearings of a U.S. congressional committee in Washington, D.C., Johnny Roselli recalled that Mahue “opened his briefcase and dumped a whole lot of money” out onto the bed. Mahue “also came up with the capsules and he explained how they were going to be used. As far as I remember, they couldn’t be used in boiling soups and things like that, but they could be used in water or otherwise, but they couldn’t last forever . . . It had to be done quickly as possible.”

  The pills were delivered to Cuba and the plot became active, but then the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred. Given the results of that fiasco, this particular plot was aborted.

  While captured soldiers of the 2506 Brigade languished in prison, the assassination plots continued. One involved the use of James B. Donovan, the Washington, D.C., lawyer who was acting as the Kennedy administration’s primary negotiator with Fidel Castro to gain the release of prisoners. It was learned that throughout the often tense negotiations, Donovan and Castro had developed a friendly bond. The Agency saw this as an opportunity. A plan was devised to have Donovan present Castro with the gift of a skin diving suit contaminated with an invisible fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin disease and infect the breathing apparatus with a lethal tubercle bacillus. The plan advanced to the stage where a suit was created and prepared for delivery, but then it was learned that Donovan had already given Castro a wetsuit.

  There is no record that Donovan, or, for that matter, President Kennedy, who were involved in delicate negotiations with Castro based on trust and honesty, were ever informed of this ill-fated scheme.

  After the prisoners were released, the plots to get Castro did not end. In fact, they ascended to a new level of development.

  In a room at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally met with former brigade commander Manuel Artime and a handful of exiles who constituted a ruling body in a renewed effort to take back Cuba. RFK apologized on behalf of the U.S. government, telling the men, “My brother was wrong. We made some tactical mistakes. We accept responsibility for what you went through and we want to make it right. This will be an all-out effort. We want your men to proceed in their activities and use any means necessary to take out Castro.”

  Present at that meeting was Francisco “Pepe” Hernandez. Back in the 1950s in Havana, Hernandez had been a member of Rescate with Tony Varona. Later, as a member of the 2506 Brigade’s Second Battalion, Hernandez landed at Playa Larga, at the northern end of the Bay of Pigs. There, as with the entire invasion, events turned ugly almost from the inception. Hernandez’s platoon was overrun, and for two weeks he sought to stay alive in the Zapata swamps with no food or water. Eventually, famished to the point of being delusional, he saw what he thought was an orange tree, though he would forever after be unsure whether the tree was real or a hallucination. In any event, he and three other men tried to get to that succulent fruit and in so doing were captured by Cuban militia. Coincidentally, one of the men captured with Hernandez was José Miguel Battle’s brother-in-law.

  Hernandez was thrown into the Castillo del Príncipe prison and held there until James Donovan negotiated the prisoners’ release. Like many others, Hernandez took advantage of President Kennedy’s offer to gain U.S. citizenship by joining the military, in his case, the Marine Corps.

  So now, in early 1963, Hernandez was standing in a hotel room with Robert Kennedy, the attorney general. “I got the impression,” said Hernandez, “that the Kennedy brothers were of a type that they were not going to take what had happened with the invasion lying down. It was not their nature to accept defeat.” The president’s brother reiterated that the commitment to overthrow Castro was stronger than ever. The president had described the brigade as “the point of the spear, the arrow’s head” for a reason. Said Pepe Hernandez, “The phrase I remember from Bobby Kennedy most vividly was that we were to use ‘any means necessary’ in the pursuit of our goals.”

  The main headquarters would be in Miami, where the CIA opened a newly reinvigorated station code-named JM/WAVE. It would be the largest CIA station in the world. The new initiative was code-named Operation Mongoose. The operatives in this battle were spreading far and wide: there were double agents active in Cuba, operatives training in places like Louisiana and in South America, and CIA operatives active in the U.S. military. And in the summer of 1963, the place where many of these people crossed paths, interfaced, and traded intelligence was the U.S. military training base at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  TO JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE, PLAYING POKER WAS A HIGHLY SOCIAL ACTIVITY, LIKE HANGing out at the corner bar or going to church on Sunday. It was through gambling that he met with old friends, made new ones, and established alliances. Those who knew him said he was never so relaxed as when he was playing cards, even when he lost money, as he often did. To Battle, playing poker wasn’t about the money; it was about the camaraderie. Around a card table was where he held court.

  At Fort Benning, José Miguel became known for presiding over card games that lasted for hours. The games took place inside the barracks where the 212 Cuban exiles were stationed separately from the other U.S. Army trainees.

  There was nothing on the official record of Battle or of the other Cubans that would show that there was anything special about their activities. And yet in fact they were training covertly under the auspices of the CIA. In the spring and summer of 1963, some of the most ambitious and notorious figures in the anti-Castro movement would receive training at Fort Benning.

  One of those men was Luis Posada Carriles, who many years later would say to a New York Times reporter of his time at Fort Benning, “The CIA taught us everything . . . They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage.”

  Posada met Battle for the first time in a card game. Battle, who was sometimes referred to by the nickname “El Gordo,” because he had put back on much of the weight he lost while in prison, was with his sidekick, Angel Mujica, his fellow cop from Havana, platoon mate, and fellow doorman to the patio at Isle of Pines prison.

  The game was for small stakes, four to six guys sitting around a table. The Cubans, recently out of prison, did not have a lot of money to throw around. The poker games were mostly a way for the men to get to know one another, and in any case, gambling for money was prohibited on the base. When a player was not sitting in on a game, he acted as a lookout, though the sergeants and other officers seemed to be tolerant of the Cubans’ card playing.

  To Posada, Battle had presence. His skin was dark; he was friendly and had an earthy sense of humor. “I liked him,” remembered Posada, “and I could see that he was not a man to be taken lightly.” Unlike Posada, who had attended university, Battle did not have much formal education, but he had street smarts. Posada had good feelings about him even though he recognized something about the man almost immediately: he cheated at cards. Posada caught Battle stacking the deck, but they both laughed about it, since the games were not serious.

  The stories of Battle’s heroism during the invasion were part of his reputation. As a fellow operative in the invasion, Posada was impressed. Posada himself had not been part of the invading brigade. Rather, he had played a different role as part of what were known as “infiltration teams,” an aspect of the invasion that some viewed as even more important than the military incursion.

  Born in Cienfuegos in 1928, Posada had attended the University of Havana in the late 1940s, where he studied medicine and chemistry. There, he made the acquaintance of Fidel Castro, a student at the university who was known to be politically active.

  Posada was not overtly political at the time. Like many young Cubans, he was intrigued by the possibilities of the revolution but quickly turned against Fidel. In 1958 and 1959, he was employed by Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Havana while secretly serving in the underground resistance.
He was briefly jailed, and in 1961 he fled to Mexico, where he sought political asylum in the Argentine embassy. He made his way to the United States and, thanks to his previous connections, landed a job with Firestone at their plant in Akron, Ohio. Once again, his job with Firestone was something of a cover for his clandestine activities. He was officially listed as a Firestone employee in Akron while he was off in Guatemala training at Base Trax.

  Even before the invasion, Posada was committed to the cause; he was part of a CIA initiative code-named Operation 40, a counterintelligence group that in 1960 had been authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower and overseen by Vice President Richard Nixon, the State Department, and the National Security Administration.

  Operation 40 was composed of men who would go on to be among the most active Cuban exiles in the anti-Castro movement, including, among others, Orlando Bosch, Felix Rodriguez, and future Watergate burglars Bernard Barker and Frank Sturgis.

  Sturgis in particular had a notorious personal history. He had been involved in the Cuban Revolution with Castro and later served as the revolutionary government’s liaison with the gaming industry (that is, Lansky, Trafficante, and others). But then he switched sides and become a double agent. Sturgis personified the American soldier of fortune. Born Frank Angelo Fiorini in Norfolk, Virginia, he had been at varying times a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Navy, and the Army. He’d also been a Norfolk cop. Eventually, he became a gun-toting mercenary and a CIA bottom feeder involved in various Cold War covert ops.

  In the late 1970s, in an interview with a journalist, Sturgis described the purpose of Operation 40. The mandate, he explained, was to incite civil war in Cuba through various sabotage operations. The group also had an even darker purpose as a political assassination squad. “This assassination group,” he said, “would, upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents . . . We were concentrating strictly on Cuba at that particular time.”

  Luis Posada, like Sturgis, was down for the cause, though even his family members were not supposed to know. José Miguel Battle might not have been aware of the details of a clandestine initiative such as Operation 40, but he knew enough to believe that Luis Posada and others like him were avenging angels in a holy crusade. At Fort Benning, he treated Posada with deference and respect. Said Posada, “He made it clear to me that we had a huge common ground in our fight against Castro. Anytime we met, the topic of conversation was the same—the need to kill Castro by any means necessary. He was a patriot. He said many times that whether he was directly involved or not, we could always count on him as a supporter of our activities.”

  Another thing the two men had in common was that they both liked guns. At Fort Benning, Battle presented Posada with a gift—a black snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38-caliber handgun. It was not an expensive or fancy weapon; the gun probably sold for around $40. But Posada was touched by the gesture.

  Through the summer of 1963 and into the fall, Posada and his cohorts dreamed about and actively planned for the overthrow of Castro. Operation Mongoose was gathering steam. According to declassified CIA documents, between June and September 1963, President Kennedy approved more than twenty acts of sabotage against Cuba. For those looking to deplete and disorient Castro’s government through a relentless campaign of counterrevolutionary activities, it looked promising. That is, until an event occurred that not only drastically altered their operations, but also changed the course of history. On November 22, in Dallas, Texas, JFK was murdered.

  THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION IS THE RUBIK’S CUBE OF AMERICAN HISTORY; THE subject can be held up to the light and viewed in many different configurations. Over many decades, there have been the Warren Commission Report (first released to the public in September 1964); multiple congressional hearings in the late 1970s; investigative studies by nearly all branches of U.S. law enforcement; an infinite number of documentaries; and a large library of published material, both investigative and speculative. And still no one has solved the puzzle.

  In the early days following the shooting, after the gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended, the emphasis in U.S. media accounts was on the Cuba connection. Oswald was described as a leftist sympathizer and a member of a pro-Castro organization called Fair Play for Cuba. Much was made of a trip he made to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City two months before the assassination to secure a visa to travel to Cuba. An incident was cited from just seven days before the assassination, in which Oswald was in New Orleans passing out pro-Cuba literature on the street and got into a shoving match with three Cuban exiles.

  The most provocative piece of evidence of Cuban involvement in the assassination was a quote by Fidel Castro, a comment he had made on September 8, 1963, at the Brazilian embassy in Havana. “The U.S. leaders must realize that if they assist in the terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will be in danger . . . Kennedy is the Batista of our time, and the most opportunistic president of all time . . . The United States is fighting a battle against us that they cannot win.”

  Eventually, the rush to blame Castro fizzled out. The Warren Commission Report made little mention of a Cuban government connection. A countertheory took shape. In this conspiracy, Oswald had been manipulated by Cuban exiles to carry out the assassination, the theory being that certain exiled militants, in conjunction with Mafia figures such as Santo Trafficante and others, wanted Kennedy dead. These exiles blamed Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs failure and for delivering Cuba into the hands of the Soviet Union; the Mafia despised the Kennedys because of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s vendetta against certain Mafia figures. A marriage of convenience that began with various plots to kill Castro had boomeranged and turned into a conspiracy to murder JFK.

  The home base for this conspiracy was New Orleans, where Trafficante met with local Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, who more than any other mobster despised the Kennedys. In April 1961, two weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, RFK had humiliated Marcello by having him apprehended by immigration officials and deported by force from the United States. The Sicilian-born Marcello sneaked back into the country and was waging war in federal court with the Immigration and Naturalization Service over his legal status. It was alleged by one of the participants in a 1962 conversation with Trafficante that while discussing a possible assassination of Robert Kennedy, Marcello said, “If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.”

  Trafficante is alleged to have made it happen, using his contacts in the Cuban exile community. According to a prominent exile activist, José Aleman, when President Kennedy’s name came up in a conversation he had with Trafficante, the Mafia boss said, “Don’t worry about him. He’s going to be hit.” According to this version of the conspiracy, Oswald was lured into the plot by New Orleans Mafia co-conspirators and anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

  The theory may have seemed far-fetched, but it received considerable support years later in the congressional testimony of Marita Lorenz, a woman known as “Castro’s mistress.”

  In 1959, while visiting Havana as a nineteen-year-old German tourist, Lorenz became romantically involved with Fidel Castro. She became pregnant by him and had an abortion, a fact Castro confirmed to be true. Later that year, after the abortion, she left the island thinking she would never return—that was until she met Frank Sturgis, whom she knew as Frank Fiorini.

  Sturgis became Marita’s CIA overseer. He convinced her to take part in another assassination attempt on Castro in 1960. Armed with poison pills provided by the CIA, she traveled to Havana and met with Castro, intending to poison his food, but she was forced to abandon the plot when she discovered that the pills had dissolved in a jar of cold cream, where she had hidden them. According to Lorenz, this plot had been devised and carried out under the auspices of Operation 40.

  Back in the United States, she c
ontinued to circulate in the orbit of Frank Sturgis and the anti-Castro exiles. Before the U.S. House Assassinations Committee in 1977, she testified that, in October 1963, she was present at a meeting in a Miami safe house that included Sturgis, various Cuban exiles affiliated with Operation 40, and Lee Harvey Oswald, whom she knew on that occasion by the nickname “Ozzie.” The group was discussing a trip to Dallas, a map of which was spread out on a table. Marita testified that a few weeks later, just days before the Kennedy assassination, she drove from Miami to Dallas with Sturgis and the same men she had seen at the Little Havana safe house in Miami. They drove in two cars containing eight men, including Orlando Bosch, a man she knew by name, and two brothers whose names she didn’t know at the time. They turned out to be Guillermo and Ignacio Novo. All of the men, Sturgis told her, were members of Operation 40.

  The group arrived in Dallas with numerous rifles and handguns in the trunks of their cars. The Cubans didn’t like that there was a woman present for “the operation,” so Lorenz flew back home the following day. She was on a flight to New York City when she learned that JFK had been assassinated in Dallas.

  Marita Lorenz was generally dismissed as an unreliable source, but some of the details she mentioned were corroborated by other sources. One name that came up in many of the accounts was Luis Posada. As a member of Operation 40, he carried out operations with many of the men Lorenz claimed to have seen together in Miami and Dallas. Most notably, Posada was part of an Operation 40 group stationed in New Orleans. They had a safe house outside the city from which they based operations, which included a scheme, partially financed by Mob boss Carlos Marcello, to smuggle military equipment to Cuba to carry out counterrevolutionary activities on the island.

  In this hornet’s nest of co-conspirators, alliances were formed, paths crossed, and assumptions made that led to a tantalizing classification: guilt by association. These names and alliances may or may not hold the key to understanding the killing of President Kennedy. Over time, they have come to comprise a historical sinkhole of personages that has spread a patina of suspicion over many, including, at least peripherally, José Miguel Battle Sr.