But a different Bobby Kennedy, five years earlier, had berated government officers 20 years his senior for their slow pace in eliminating Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
More than most, Bobby himself appreciated the importance of his personal transformation following the assassination. Toward the end of his life, he mused, “I have wondered at times if we did not pay a very great price for being more energetic than wise about a lot of things, especially Cuba.”
He was right.
Gus Russo
Baltimore, MD
August 1998
CAST OF CHARACTERS
(In chronological order by section)
Members of the U.S. Intelligence Community
Allen Welsh Dulles
CIA Director during the Cold War Warren Commissioner
Richard Bissell
CIA Director of Covert Operations
Jake Esterline
CIA Coordinator of Bay of Pigs
Lyman Kirkpatrick
CIA Inspector General
John McCone
CIA Director after Allen Dulles
E. Howard Hunt
CIA CubaProject Officer; Watergate burglar
Joseph Caldwell (“J.C.”) King
CIA Western Hemisphere Chief
Robert Maheu
CIA freelancer; Former FBI Agent
Charlie Ford
CIA Case Officer(Mafia-CIA liaison)
Richard Helms
CIA Deputy Director of Plans CIA Director (after Dulles)
William King Harvey
CIA Officer in charge of ZR/RIFLE Coordinator of Task Force W
Sam Halpern
CIA Executive Assistant to William Harvey the Cuba Project; and, later, Desmond FitzGerald
Theodore Shackley
CIA Station Chief, JM/WAVE (Miami)
Desmond FitzGerald
CIA Special Affairs Staff, Cuba
Lt. Commander John Gordon III (USN)
Naval Intelligence Officer Office of Field Intelligence Guantanamo Bay
Win Scott
CIA Station Chief, Mexico City
David Atlee Phillips
CIA Director of Covert Operation Cuban Affairs, Mexico City
James Angleton
CIA Counterintelligence Chief
American Politicians
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK)
President (1961-1963)
Robert Francis Kennedy (RFK)
Attorney General (1961-1964)
Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ)
Vice-President (1961-1963) President (1963-1969)
Joseph Kennedy Sr.
Father of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy
Dwight D. Eisenhower
President (1953-1961)
Richard Nixon
Eisenhower’s Vice-President; Later President
John Connally
Governor of Texas
Bobby Baker
Friend of Lyndon Johnson
Anti-Castro Cubans and other Anti-Castro Activists
Sergio Arcadia Smith (Arcadia)
Cuban Revolutionary Council Delegate New Orleans
David Ferrie
Anti-Castro activist for Arcacha; Freelancer for Banister
Fulgencio Batista
President of Cuba before Fidel Castro took power
Manuel Artime
Military Leader of Brigade 2506
Second Naval Guerrilla organizer Founder of the Movement for Revolutionary Recovery
Rolando Cubela Secades (Cubela)
AM/LASH (Proposed assassin of Fidel Castro)
Gerry Hemming
American mercenary Anti-Castro activist
Layton Martens
Volunteer with Cuban Revolutionary Council New Orleans
Guy Banister
Detective, New Orleans Former FBI Special Agent in Charge, Chicago
Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams
Former member of Brigade 2506 Friend of Robert F. Kennedy
Roberto San Román (Roberto)
Commander of Brigade 2506 Friend of Robert F. Kennedy
Pepe San Román (Pepe)
Commander of Brigade 2506 Friend of Robert F. Kennedy
Pro-Castro Individuals (and Their Loved Ones)
Fidel Castro
Cuban President
Lee Harvey Oswald
Murderer of John F. Kennedy
Raul Castro
Brother of Fidel Castro, and second-in-line for presidency
Che Guevara
Second-in-command to Fidel Castro
Marina Oswald
Wife of Oswald
Marguerite Oswald
Mother of Oswald
Organized Crime Figures, Gamblers, and Associates
Meyer Lansky
Norman Rothman
Associate of Meyer Lansky Cuban casino manager
Santos Trafficante, Jr
Mafia leader, Tampa, FL controlled Cuban casinos in Batista’s Cuba
Johnny Rosselli
Las Vegas Mafia: “Mr. Smooth” worked with CIA on assassination plots especially Phase One
Sam Giancana
Chicago Mafia Don
Michael (Mike) McLaney
Shareholder in Hotel Nacional Friend of Joseph Kennedy, Sr.
William McLaney
Brother of Mike McLaney (in New Orleans)
Carlos Marcello
New Orleans Mafia Don
Soviet Leaders and Diplomats
Nikita Khrushchev
Premier
Valery Kostikov
KGB agent;Consular Official Russian Consulate, Mexico City
American Planners and Officials
Robert McNamara
Secretary of Defense
Admiral Arleigh Burke
Chief of Naval Operations
General Maxwell Taylor
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Brigadier General Edward Lansdale
White House Coordinator of Operation MONGOOSE
Dean Rusk
Secretary of State
Admiral Robert Dennison
Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet (CINCLANT)
General Alexander Haig
Cuban Coordinating Committee Deputy to Joseph Califano Military assistant to Cyrus Vance
Cyrus Vance
Secretary of the Army; Cuban Coordinating Committee
Joseph Califano
Director of the Cuban Coordinating Committee
Nicholas Katzenbach
Deputy Attorney General under Robert F. Kennedy Attorney General after RFK
Presidential Aides
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr
Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy
McGeorge Bundy
National Security Advisor to John F. Kennedy
Walt Rostow
Advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
FBI Officials
J. Edgar Hoover
Director of the FBI
Jim Hosty
FBI Agent in Dallas; Case Officer for Oswald
Warren DeBrueys
FBI Special Agent in Charge, New Orleans
Investigators and Others
G. Robert Blakey
Chief Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (after Richard Sprague)
Sylvia Duran
Secretary to the Consul, Cuban Consulate, Mexico City
J.D. Tippit
Police Officer, Dallas
Jim Garrison
District Attorney, New Orleans
Earl Warren
Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Chairman of the Warren Commission
Gerald R. Ford
Warren Commissioner; Later President
Clay Shaw
Private citizen, New Orleans
Nelso
n Rockefeller
Gerald Ford’s Vice-President Director of the Rockefeller Commission
Frank Church
Senator, Idaho (D); Chairman of the Church Committee
Richard Sprague
Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)
KENNEDY
CHAPTER ONE
THE STORY BEGINS
The Backstory: Cuba in the 1950’s and the Emergence of Fidel Castro
“Cuba seems to have the same effect on American administrations as the full moon used to have on werewolves.”
—Wayne Smith, Former U.S. State Department Officer in Havana
At the center of it all was Cuba—a small tropical island a mere 90 miles off the U.S. coast. Its recent, tumultuous, and largely secret past is the hidden key which unlocks the mysteries of the century’s most important mystery. Only by coming to grips with Cuba can any of us truly understand that catastrophic day in Dallas, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and when the trust between a nation and its citizens began to crumble. Nor, in an intelligent way, can U.S. foreign policy be crafted and executed without knowing what motivated U.S. leaders to wage an undeclared war against the tiny, and seemingly insignificant, country of Cuba.
In the United States of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, Cuba was a ticking time bomb. During a lengthy period of Cold War hostility, the antagonism between Cuba and the United States became so well-established that in 1963, when John Kennedy was killed, many Americans felt that the U.S.-Cuban disputes had been going on forever. Actually, the conflict was quite young. But by making it their Alpha and Omega, the brothers Kennedy escalated the tensions beyond all reason, and thus guaranteed their own downfall. For while the U.S. government preached its own brand of jingoism, it was matched by the feverish activities of those who believed Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, to be a virtual Messiah. The polarities that created such volatile obsessions are rooted in Cuba’s unique history.
For years, Cuba had been an American vassal. The U.S. had forced itself into the Cuban constitution with the inclusion of the notorious “Platt Amendment,” which allowed for U.S. intervention whenever it felt the urge. Until Castro’s 1959 revolution, Cuba was ruled by a series of dictators who redefined the terms graft and corruption. The most corrupt of these was President Fulgencio Batista, who controlled the country until the Castro takeover. And, as pointed out by historian Michael Beschloss, Batista had ingratiated himself nicely with his neighbors to the north:
During World War II, he enlisted Cuba behind the Allies, protecting the American naval base at Guantanamo and selling Cuba’s 1941 sugar crop to the United States at bargain prices. By the 1950’s Americans owned 40 percent of the Cuban sugar industry, 80 percent of Cuban utilities, and 90 percent of Cuban mining.1
Under Batista, Cuba’s economic involvement with the U.S. exploded. By the 1950’s, 75 percent of Cuba’s imports were from the United States, which benefited from the fact that its commodities enjoyed a unique exemption from Cuban import duties. By 1958, American investments on the island were approaching the 1 billion dollar mark. The signs of American business and culture were inescapable in Cuba. The Chase Manhattan Bank, Procter and Gamble, Colgate, Texaco, Goodyear, Remington, Borden, Sears, Ford, U.S. Rubber, Standard Oil, Coke, Pepsi—all had substantial holdings on the island.
The Kennedys themselves were among those to benefit from this tropical nest-egg. According to some reports, Joseph Kennedy Sr. had owned stock in a profitable Coca-Cola franchise on the island with Irish tenor and Coke spokesman Morton Downey, Sr.2 In addition, Robert Kennedy’s father-in-law, George Skakel, had financial holdings in Cuba, represented there by Cuban attorney Dr. Carlos Johns.3 Skakel’s company, Great Lakes Carbon, had made the family wealthy. Great Lakes’ worldwide holdings included some in Batista-era Cuba, where the firm supplied filters used in the sugar industry. Skakel maintained close friendships with CIA officers, often supplying them with intelligence data he received from the island, some of which would later be used to plan the Bay of Pigs invasion. When the Castro enterprise began, his daughter, Ethel, was known to fear its revolutionary tendencies, and pray for its defeat.4
Castro also profited from the excesses of the Batista era and its relationship with the United States. His father had made money from the American-owned United Fruit Company, which had a presence on the island. The young Fidel even tried to cash in on the U.S.-Cuban relationship in professional baseball. In the 1940’s, legendary American baseball scout Joe Cambria twice turned down Fidel Castro, then a young, athletic baseball player. “Uncle Joe scouted Castro and told him he didn’t have a major league arm,” said Washington Senators’ owner Clark Griffith, who employed Cambria to milk Latin America for its raw baseball talent.
Fellow scout Ruben Amaro jokes, “[Cambria] could have changed history if he remembered that some pitchers just mature late.”5 And Castro’s pitching did mature. By the late 1940’s, he became known for his wicked curve ball. One Pittsburgh Pirates scout recalled, “He could set ‘em up with the curve, blow ‘em down with the heater.” By 1949, Castro was indeed offered a contract with the New York Giants and a $5,000 signing bonus. But by then Castro’s law studies and political interests had taken root. “We couldn’t believe he turned us down,” remembered a Giants scout. “Nobody from Latin America had [ever] said ‘no’ before.”6
Other beneficiaries of the Batista regime included prominent representatives of organized crime. Havana had become a kind of offshore Las Vegas, and Mafia enterprises were obscenely profitable. Raw opium from South America (and possibly from Asia) was processed on the island. Cuban children suffered from disease and malnutrition, but the casinos reaped huge profits ($100 million profit from gambling alone, according to the best estimates).7 These were supplemented by earnings from abortion services and prostitution. The island was a great draw for American tourists.
The corrupt Batista even hired U.S. mob boss Meyer Lansky to (in the dictator’s words) “clean up” the casinos. Lansky, at the time a fugitive from the IRS, was happy to accept the offer. Soon, crime figures from Las Vegas, Miami, Cleveland, and elsewhere were moving in on Havana, where Lansky doled out the casino franchises.
Batista’s corruption was recently summarized by historian Thomas G. Paterson:
Probably 20 to 25% of government expenditures represented graft and payoffs. Batista’s personal wealth stood somewhere between $60 and $300 million. In 1959 revolutionary government officials opened his safe deposit boxes and found $20 million. . . When Batista and his close corruptionists fled the country as 1958 turned into 1959, they took with them—nobody knows how much for sure—some 350 million pesos of the national treasury (one peso equaled one dollar).8
But the bubble was soon to burst, for Batista’s greed began to foster strong revolutionary movements which threatened to topple the dictator. When Castro started his movement in the early 1950’s, many key players in Cuba, weary from extortion by the Batista regime, were willing to assist. For a time, according to Cuban soldier Ramon Conte, Castro enlisted the CIA’s help and himself became a CIA informant.9 CIA agent Ross Crozier, who was assigned to work with Fidel in the mountains as he prepared his final push against the Batista regime, recently corroborated this: “[CIA Western Hemisphere Chief] J.C. King had come down to talk to Fidel in 1959.”10 Castro so wanted the Americans’ support, according to Crozier, that he readily supplied Crozier with details of his own troop movements. “Fidel gave us much intelligence. I went on the Manzanillo raid with him.” Crozier still possesses a letter of introduction, written on his behalf by Fidel, in which the Cuban leader instructed his associates to give “Mr. Ross” all the cooperation he needed, including access to Raul Castro, his brother.
In December 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent a representative to Havana to persuade Batista to resign. However, on January 1, 1959, before Batista could respond, Castro marched victoriously into the streets of Havana, declaring, “For the f
irst time, the Republic will really be entirely free.” He later declared, “The Platt Amendment is finished.”
One of Castro’s first acts as Cuba’s leader was to close the largely American-owned casinos (together with many of the country clubs), which the emerging dictator turned into schools and hospitals. “When the barbudos (‘bearded ones’) from the hills marched into Havana the day after New Year’s of 1959,” a historian of the period recently wrote, “the first thing the happy street throngs did was to smash parking meters and slot machines in the casinos, the most immediate symbols of the American presence in their lives.”11 Fidel next nationalized all international businesses on the island. Huge enterprises like Coca-Cola and United Fruit, not to mention their owners, suffered greatly.12
Batista’s departure and Castro’s takeover began a huge influx of disenchanted and fearful Cubans to the nearby coasts of the United States, particularly Miami and New Orleans. No wonder. On his island nation, Castro was orchestrating a political purge, dominated by trials and executions of “war criminals.” The year following his takeover of Cuba, he presided over the machine-gun executions of thousands of handcuffed opponents, who were then bulldozed into mass graves. Thousands more were left to rot, naked, in solitary cells on the Isle of Pines. The year 1961 was officially declared “The Year of the Firing Squad” by Castro lieutenant Captain Antonio Jimenez.13