Legacy of Secrecy (6 page)

resolved by the end of 1963. They didn’t want US troops fighting in

Cuba over the holidays, so that part of the operation would have to be

completed well before Christmas. Lastly, since the final versions of the

“Plan for a Coup in Cuba” called for the use of US air power, the coup

had to occur before the Pearl Harbor anniversary of December 7, so as

not to raise the specter of that event and saddle the United States with

accusations of a Japanese-style sneak attack.26

As noted earlier, Almeida’s wife and children had already left Cuba

on a pretext, and CIA operatives kept them under discreet surveillance

in another country. Bobby had Harry Williams assure Almeida that he

and the CIA would guarantee the family’s safety and security if Almeida

were killed or captured in the coup. At the time, Bobby, Harry, and CIA

Director McCone never imagined that this part of the secret operation

would go on for decades.

Bobby finished his final meetings with his key Cuban exile leaders in

the week leading up to November 22, 1963. On that date, in the words

of the
Washington Post
, Harry Williams was having “the most crucial of

a series of secret meetings with top-level CIA and government people

about . . . ‘the problem of Cuba’” at a safe house in Washington, D.C.27

Unless an unforeseen problem arose at that meeting, Harry had been

instructed by Bobby to proceed to Miami, and then to the US base at

Guantanamo. From there, he would slip into Cuba for a final meeting

with Almeida before the coup and “elimination” of Fidel. Once Harry

was inside Castro’s Cuba, it would be difficult—perhaps impossible—to

call off the coup. If all went according to plan, Harry would be inside

hostile Cuban territory, beyond US protection and reliable communica-

tion, by November 24 (Sunday) or November 25 (Monday). That would

leave only a few days between the time Harry met with Almeida inside

Cuba and the day Fidel was eliminated, Sunday, December 1, 1963.

Setting the coup for December 1 was possible because almost every

weekend Fidel traveled to—and from—his house at Varadero Beach in

an open jeep. In those days, Fidel often rode in such a vehicle, instead of

in a limousine, to evoke his triumphant jeep trip to Havana at the climax

of the Revolution. As a Kennedy aide explained to us, and as numerous

historians have confirmed, Fidel’s security precautions were legend-

ary: He often varied his schedule, used doubles, and had meetings at

odd late-night hours to foil any potential plotting. Such safety measures

meant that Castro’s weekly jeep trip to Varadero was virtually the only

reliable opportunity for an assassination attempt.

In 1962, and again in the fall of 1963, the CIA had reviewed a plan in

which Fidel would be killed at a restaurant he frequented. Diagrams

were drawn to show how a shooter could hide in the pantry, since Fidel

always went into the kitchen to talk to the cooks and busboys.28 But this

plan was too risky and inflexible, compared with simply having snipers

shoot Fidel in his open jeep as he traveled to or from Varadero Beach.

A later AMWORLD document talks about assassinating Fidel “when

he goes to Varadero,” and says one of Bobby’s Cuban exile aides was

given “the details and the exact locations where Fidel spends every

Saturday and Sunday, and specifically every Sunday at Varadero.”29

Cuban exile Rafael “Chi Chi” Quintero, the assistant to one of Bobby’s

exile leaders, Manuel Artime, later said “the plot finally agreed on was

a combined assassination-coup attempt at Varadero, the beach resort on

Cuba’s north coast, [where a CIA asset] was supposed to kill [Fidel] with

a rifle.”30 Commander Almeida knew the local commander at Varadero,

a man later said to have been one of the coup plotters. CIA propaganda

expert David Atlee Phillips worked on AMWORLD and, years after his

retirement, wrote a proposal for an autobiographical novel that lightly

fictionalized his CIA work. In it, he said that Fidel would be shot “with

a sniper’s rifle from an upper floor window of a building on the route

where Castro often drove in an open jeep.”31

A later declassified memo that mentions Almeida says the assassina-

tion of Fidel “is to take place in public so that everyone can see that the

leaders have been killed.”32 This was important, so that Fidel’s death

couldn’t be hidden from the Cuban populace for days, weeks, or even

months. Varadero is only seventy-five miles from Havana, so killing

Fidel there in such a public way would ensure the news spread quickly.

This would give Almeida and his associates a reason to immediately

18

LEGACY OF SECRECY

arrest the patsy, and to invite in US forces to prevent a civil war and a

Soviet takeover. According to Harry Williams and several declassified

memos about the coup, Raul Castro would be eliminated along with

Fidel. CIA memos show that Almeida was involved with Raul’s security,

allowing him to ensure that Raul was taken care of at the same time

Castro was killed.33

While December 1, 1963, was the coup date given in the CIA Direc-

tor’s memo (other CIA memos mention the same general time period),

Harry Williams told us it was possible he might move the coup up by

one day because he didn’t trust one of the other Cuban exile leaders,

Manuel Artime. In October and November 1963, growing friction had

developed between Harry Williams and Artime, because the latter had

starting going to Bobby about various matters, behind Harry’s back.

The extremely conservative Artime had agreed only reluctantly to work

with more liberal exile leaders chosen by Harry and Bobby, and Artime

would have preferred to become the sole leader of Cuba after Fidel’s

assassination. Artime was often called the CIA’s “Golden Boy” because

of all the money and attention lavished on him by the CIA and his best

friend, CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, so Harry worried that Artime

might try to get a jump on the other exile leaders. To prevent this

possibility, Harry and Almeida could quietly move the coup date one

day earlier, to Saturday, November 30, the day that Fidel would drive

into Varadero. Once Harry was inside Cuba, meeting with Almeida, the

final decision about the date for the coup and Fidel’s “elimination” would

be theirs.

According to two close associates of the Kennedy brothers, neither

JFK nor Bobby considered the JFK-Almeida coup plan to be an assassina-

tion plot. They explained that the Kennedys saw Castro’s “elimination”

during a coup by Almeida as far different from the CIA’s earlier (and,

unknown to the Kennedys, ongoing) plan to simply have Mafia assassins

shoot Fidel. As noted in declassified files and confirmed by our sources,

the President and the Attorney General viewed the JFK-Almeida coup

plan as providing aid to “Cubans helping other Cubans”—supporting

Cubans outside Cuba (Harry and selected exile leaders) so they could

help Cubans inside Cuba (Almeida and his allies).34

As described in the fourteen drafts of the “Plan for a Coup in

Cuba”—most written in a flurry of activity after Almeida’s May 1963

offer—extensive plans had been made for the coup, the US invasion, and

the post-coup Cuban government. The Kennedys’ goals were to bring

about eventual free elections, and to produce a Cuba free of the Mafia

influence that had been so pervasive during the Eisenhower-Nixon

administration.

Though these drafts involved State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, and

the CIA, the Kennedys had devised a way for plans to be made without

revealing Almeida’s identity to so many officials and aides that it became

an open secret, like the Bay of Pigs. As files released in recent years docu-

ment, and former officials confirm, most of the planning involving those

agencies occurred under the guise of a “what if” scenario: What if a very

high official could be found to stage a coup against Castro?35

During the summer and fall of 1963, selected officials from those

agencies knew about three ongoing attempts to find such an official. One

was a plan code-named AMTRUNK by the CIA, though it was originally

the brainchild of
New York Times
journalist Tad Szulc, a friend of JFK.

The second was a joint CIA-DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) Task

Force designed to find a high Cuban official willing to stage a coup. The

third centered on a disgruntled midlevel Cuban official named Rolando

Cubela, with whom the CIA had been in contact since late 1960. Cubela

was brought to the CIA’s attention by a Trafficante associate, a busi-

nessman the CIA code-named AMWHIP-1, who remained in contact

with Cubela in 1963 and later.36 Inside the CIA, Cubela was referred to

as AMLASH, but those in other agencies who knew about him simply

referred to him by his real name.37 Though Cubela, a physician, had

no real power within the Cuban government, as the former leader of

a prominent revolutionary student group (the DR38), he was allowed a

large travel budget and frequently went to Europe and communist-bloc

countries. One of Bobby’s secret NSC subcommittees was told that the

CIA was using Cubela to try to locate a high official willing to stage a

coup.39 Cubela himself wasn’t powerful enough to lead a coup, since an

October 18, 1963, CIA memo says “that Cubela has no official position in

the government.”40 Because of his service during the Revolution, Cubela

had been awarded a purely ceremonial military title, but according to

an October 30, 1963, CIA memo, he lost that when he “resigned from

the Army after difficulties with Raul Castro.”41

Planning progressed on the coup, invasion, and post-coup Cuban

government by Bobby’s subcommittees “just in case” a high-ranking

Cuban official could be found. This allowed JFK and Bobby to get rep-

resentatives from those agencies to do extensive planning, without

revealing prematurely that Cuban Army Commander Juan Almeida

had already agreed in May 1963 to lead the coup. In one memo, Army

Secretary Cyrus Vance lists several possible scenarios by which Fidel

20

LEGACY OF SECRECY

might be toppled, but states they will initially focus only on a “palace

coup” by a powerful Cuban official; Vance says plans for the other sce-

narios will be prepared later. Of course, these plans were never made,

because Vance knew they wouldn’t be needed.

With the coup planning largely complete by November 22, 1963, the

Kennedys thought they had no need to inform officials like Secretary

of State Dean Rusk about Almeida until shortly before the December 1

coup. On November 22, Rusk and several other cabinet officials, as well

as JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, were flying to the Far East. A

still partially classified series of memos between Bobby Kennedy and

National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy reveals that as of Novem-

ber 20, “The Cuban problem is ready for discussion now . . . so we will

call a meeting as soon as we can find a day when the right people are in

town.” With JFK going to Texas, while Bundy, Rusk, and other cabinet

officials were in the Far East, that meant Monday, November 25, would

be the soonest day all the parties would be available. But by that day,

assuming there was no last-minute breakthrough in the secret peace

talks with Fidel, Harry would be in Cuba to meet Almeida and the coup

plan would be past its “fail-safe” point. That would be when Rusk and

others could simply be told that all their efforts to find someone to stage

a coup had yielded results, and that the action had been set for December

1, using the plans they had already developed and agreed to.

Bobby’s method yielded an odd situation in which only some officials

on the subcommittees knew about Almeida and realized all the plan-

ning was for real; officials in this group included Cyrus Vance, General

Maxwell Taylor, CIA Director John McCone, Richard Helms, and only

a few more. Others on the subcommittees didn’t know about Almeida

and thought the planning was just a “what if” exercise, contingent on

finding a high-ranking Cuban official to lead the coup; those in this

group included Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk.42 This meant that in

any particular meeting, some of those attending knew about Almeida

and that the coup was fast approaching, and some did not. The declas-

sified notes from those meetings show the torturous wording that was

sometimes used to convey necessary information without revealing too

much to those not yet fully in the loop.43

Bobby’s method proved extremely effective in keeping secret both

Almeida’s identity and the imminence of the coup, while allowing him

to maintain tight control of the overall plan. But it also contributed to

disastrous intelligence failures, since some people in the meetings knew

the urgency of the situation, while others viewed the planning as more

of a routine bureaucratic exercise. Worse, important agencies such as