Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (36 page)

Milteer: Oh yeah, it is in the working.

Informant: Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we have got to know where we are at. Because you know that will be a real shake if they do that.

Milteer: They wouldn’t leave any stone unturned there, no way. They will pick somebody up within hours afterwards, if anything like that would happen. Just to throw the public off.

Captain Charles Sapp, head of Miami’s Police Intelligence Bureau, and his team of a dozen detectives had worked closely with the Secret Service during a previous presidential visit to Miami. Now, with the President due on November 18—four days before the shots that would kill him in
Dallas—Sapp had new cause to worry.

Milteer, the extremist on the tape, was a wealthy agitator and member of a galaxy of ultra-right-wing groups including the National States Rights Party, which had close links to anti-Castro extremists. Sapp passed on the remark that the President’s assassination was “in the working” to other agencies. The Secret Service did check on Milteer’s whereabouts, and there was an assassination alert on November 18, when Kennedy arrived in Tampa, his first stop in Florida.

The second stop was in Miami, where the President addressed the Inter-American Press Association about Cuba, a speech that—Arthur Schlesinger was to write—had been carefully crafted for listeners across the straits in Havana, Cuba.

It was freighted with significance.

“It is important to restate what divides Cuba from my country …” Kennedy told his listeners. “It is the fact that a small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. They have made Cuba a victim of foreign imperialism … a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American republics. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible… . Once Cuban sovereignty has been restored we will extend the hand of friendship and assistance.”

This has become known as the “signal” speech. The headline over the UPI report of the speech in the following day’s newspapers was “Kennedy Virtually Invites Cuban Coup.” The report said the President had “all but invited the Cuban people to overthrow Fidel
Castro’s Communist regime and promised prompt U.S. aid if they do… . The President said it would be a happy day if the Castro government is ousted.”

According to a 1976 Senate Intelligence Committee report, the CIA’s Desmond FitzGerald, had helped write the speech. Word was passed to Castro aide Rolando Cubela, with whom FitzGerald had met so recently to discuss the murder of the Cuban leader, that the reference to a “small band of conspirators” was to the Cuban government—a reference designed to reassure him that the President personally supported a coup.
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Whomever in Havana the “signal” message was precisely intended for—and it seems to this author that it sent encouragement to any and all of Castro’s enemies—it conflicted directly with the ongoing peace feelers entrusted to William Attwood. Even as the President flew home from Florida, Attwood was on his way to another tussle with the telephone in reporter Lisa Howard’s apartment.
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As they strove to nail down an acceptable formula for talks, he and Castro’s aide Vallejo had continued to be thwarted by telephone delays and broken connections. Now at last, in the early morning hours of November 19, they did have a proper conversation.

Though Attwood did not know it at the time, he was effectively speaking to Castro himself—the Cuban leader was seated at Vallejo’s side throughout the conversation. Castro still hoped a U.S. representative would come to Cuba. There was no way he could himself come to the United States, yet this was a matter only he could deal with. The Cuban side, for their part, would submit an agenda for the proposed talks. Castro gave an assurance, meanwhile, that Che Guevara, his close comrade and a hardliner who favored maintaining the relationship with the Soviets, would not be involved.

Later on
November 19, at an initial meeting with Castro in Havana, the French journalist Jean Daniel briefed the Cuban leader on his recent talk with President Kennedy. For now, Castro responded, he could not discuss the future of Cuba’s links with Moscow. Nevertheless, he said, he saw new hope for a breakthrough in relations with the United States—under Kennedy as President.

“He still has the possibility,” Castro said, “of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest president of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas… . I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with… . Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this: He has come to understand many things over the past few months; and then, too, in the last analysis, I’m convinced that anyone else would be worse.”

When Daniel saw the President again, Castro added, he could “tell him that I’m willing to declare [leading Republican contender of the day Barry] Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy’s reelection! … Since you are going to see Kennedy again, be an emissary of peace.”

In the United States, meanwhile, William Attwood had called the White House to report on his latest stint on the phone to Cuba. Adviser McGeorge Bundy had again briefed the President. As had been mooted earlier, Attwood was to “see what could be done to effect a normalization of relationship.” The President would decide “what to say to Castro” and brief Attwood as soon as Havana came up with an agenda. Kennedy would not be leaving Washington, Bundy said, except for a brief visit to Texas …

Dallas.

On November 21, according to an informant reporting to the Secret Service, a Cuban exile named Homer Echevarría fulminated against the President while negotiating a covert arms deal. The money for the guns would be ready shortly, he said, “as soon as we take care of Kennedy.” Later investigation would establish that Echevarría’s associate in the arms deal had been the military head of the DRE—that group again—and financing was coming from “hoodlum elements”—the Mafia.

On the morning of November 22, CIA’s Cuba chief Desmond FitzGerald held a meeting to discuss plans—said to have been in their final stages—for Castro’s removal. The meeting was “the most important I ever had on the problem of Cuba,” recalled Enrique Ruiz-Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran and member of the inner coterie of the administration’s anti-Castro deliberations.

Were coup plans indeed in their final stages? “If Jack Kennedy had lived,” FitzGerald would tell colleagues four months after the assassination, “I can assure you we would have gotten rid of Castro by last Christmas.”

On November 22, at a further meeting in Paris—with FitzGerald’s knowledge and approval—CIA case officer Nestor Sanchez handed Cubela—the presumed traitor—an alternative assassination device with which to kill Castro, a Paper Mate pen modified to serve as a poison syringe. Just two days earlier, barely twenty-four hours after John F. Kennedy had approved pressing on with peace feelers toward Castro, CIA technicians had worked through the night preparing the weapon. As Sanchez and Cubela ended their meeting, news came through that the President had been shot dead in Dallas.
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Desmond
FitzGerald died four years later, never having told official investigators of his role in the plots to kill Castro. According to his family, he would never afterward speak of the President’s assassination.

Lisa Howard, the CBS journalist who had acted as go-between to Castro officials during the Attwood peace initiative, died two years after the assassination.
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“Lisa had seen herself as a Joan of Arc,” her friend Gore Vidal recalled, “rushing between the two sides to help bring peace. Castro had told her of the efforts by the CIA against him, and it upset her to think that the Kennedys had been talking peace when they were also out to do him in. I think all this is why Bobby never really wanted Jack’s assassination investigated. Because the more they dug up, the more quickly they would ask whether Castro had done it to forestall the Kennedys. And the Kennedys would come to be regarded as American Borgias.”

Two hours after hearing that his brother was dead, Robert Kennedy placed a call to the Ebbitt Hotel on H Street NW, in Washington, DC, a nondescript establishment the CIA used to lodge Cuban exiles. His call was to the room of Enrique Ruiz-Williams, just back from the meeting to discuss plans for Castro’s violent overthrow and now in conversation with the author Haynes Johnson, who was working on a book about the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy spoke with them both, and said something remarkable. “Kennedy was utterly in control of his emotions when he came on the line,” Johnson was to write, “and was studiedly brisk as he said, ‘One of your guys did it.’ ”
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The public face of alleged assassin Oswald, of course, was the very opposite of an anti-Castro activist.

Robert
Kennedy flailed around in his immediate first suspicions. “At the time,” he was to tell his aide Walter Sheridan, “I asked [CIA director] McCone … if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.” McCone was a Kennedy appointee, though, and some of those handling the dark side of anti-Castro operations may not have kept him fully informed. The President’s brother came to realize that.

On December 9, 1963, Arthur Schlesinger discussed the assassination with Robert Kennedy. “I asked him, perhaps tactlessly, about Oswald. He said that there could be no serious doubt that he was guilty, but there was still argument whether he did it by himself or as a part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters. He said that the FBI thought he had done it by himself, but that McCone thought there were two people involved in the shooting.”

In spite of his doubts, Robert played no role in the ensuing investigation, although as Attorney General he was the nation’s senior law officer. “There was no way of getting to the bottom of the assassination,” wrote Harris Wofford, a former special assistant in the Kennedy White House, “without uncovering the very stories he hoped would be hidden forever. So he closed his eyes and ears to the cover-up that he knew (or soon discovered) [former CIA Director] Allen Dulles was perpetrating on the Warren Commission, and took no steps to inform the Commission of the Cuban and Mafia connections that would have provided the main clues to any conspiracy.”

Further inquiries were undesirable, the President’s brother told William Attwood, for “reasons of national security.”

Casting the First Stone

“Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.”

—William
Shakespeare,
The Rape of Lucrece

F
our days after John F. Kennedy’s funeral, President Lyndon B. Johnson summoned Chief Justice Warren to the White House to press him to chair the commission of inquiry into the assassination. When Warren proved reluctant—he did not think a member of the Supreme Court should serve on a presidential commission—Johnson appealed to his sense of duty to the nation. “The gravity of the situation was such,” Warren recalled Johnson telling him, “that it might lead us into war … it might be a nuclear war.” According to Johnson himself, he showed the Chief Justice a report he had received about “a little incident in Mexico City.” War could come, he said, “if the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev”—a war that, the Defense Secretary had told him, “might cost the loss of forty million people.”

Only a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world had come closer to nuclear war than at any time before or since, the new President apparently felt he was staring into the abyss. The Soviet Union ordered a nuclear alert, fearing it would be blamed for the assassination. Drawing on his privileged access to closely held information, former Assassinations Committee Chief Counsel Robert
Blakey told the author, “The Russians were on alert, and it looked like the beginning, or the possible beginning, of nuclear war. My distinct understanding,” he wrote in February 2013, “was that the military in the Soviet Union and the United States were on full alert. SAC [Strategic Air Command] bombers were in the air in force.”

Cuba was a potential target. Citing contemporary sources, Oswald’s FBI case agent James Hosty wrote decades later that “fully armed [U.S.] warplanes were sent screaming toward Cuba. Just before they entered Cuban airspace, they were hastily called back. With the launching of warplanes, the entire U.S. military went on alert.”

The best information available, a contemporary memo to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, indicates that U.S. Southern Command went to DEFCON 4, while the Pacific Command went to DEFCON 3, a higher alert status.

The crisis, former Chief Counsel Blakey told the author, ended only when President Johnson personally assured the Soviets that the United States had no evidence of Soviet involvement and planned no reprisals.

If public statements meant anything, Cuba’s position was clear within hours. “Despite the antagonisms existing between the government of the United States and the Cuban revolution,” said Havana’s U.N. ambassador Carlos Lechuga—one of the key players in the recent efforts to arrange a dialogue between Washington, DC, and Havana, Cuba. “We have received with profound displeasure the news of the tragic death of President Kennedy.”

In Cuba, the French journalist Jean Daniel had been with Castro at the moment he took a call from Cuban President Osvaldo
Dorticós, informing him of the shooting.
1
Castro, Daniel later recalled, sat back in his chair and repeated three times, “
Es una mala noticia
… .This is bad news.” Then he fell silent. Castro said he thought the deed “could equally well have been the work of a madman or a terrorist.”

A second call said Kennedy might still be alive, that there might be hope of saving him. If he were saved, the Cuban leader said, he would effectively be “already re-elected [for a second term].” He said it, Daniel noted, with an air of satisfaction. News that the President had died came as those present listened to NBC radio broadcasting from Miami. Castro rose to his feet. “Everything is changed,” he said, “ Everything is going to change… . The Cold War, relations with Russia, Latin America, Cuba, the Negro question … all will have to be rethought. I’ll tell you one thing: At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed. This is a serious matter, an extremely serious matter.”

A fifteen-minute break in broadcasting followed, broken only by the tones of the American national anthem on the radio. “Strange indeed was the impression,” Daniel wrote, “on hearing this anthem ring out in the house of Fidel Castro, in the midst of a circle of worried faces… . ‘Now,’ Fidel said, ‘they will have to find the assassin quickly, otherwise you wait and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing… .’ ”

Castro and Daniel were on the road in a car, still listening to the radio, when a commentator suggested that the alleged assassin was “a spy married to a Russian.” It would be his turn next, Castro said, and so in a sense it was. Word came that Oswald had been a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and a Castro admirer. “If they had had proof,” Castro said, “they would have said he was an agent, a hired
killer. In saying simply that he is an admirer, this is just to try and make an association in people’s minds between the name of Castro and the emotion awakened by the assassination. This is a publicity method, a propaganda device. It’s terrible.” As the radio began calling Oswald a “pro-Castro Marxist,” Castro canceled his planned schedule and—Daniel believed—ordered a state of alert.

Castro had been right about the reflex reaction of many in the United States. Newspaper editorials were to speak darkly of “The Enemy Without,” and a Gallup Poll revealed that a large number of Americans thought Russia, Cuba, or “the Communists” were involved. In Dallas on the night of the assassination, Assistant District Attorney William Alexander spoke of charging Oswald with having murdered the President “as part of an international Communist conspiracy.”

President Johnson, already back in Washington, DC, saw to it that there would be no such charge. Henry Wade, the District Attorney himself, would recall receiving not one but three calls from an aide to the new President. “Washington’s word to me,” he said, “was that it would hurt foreign relations if I alleged a conspiracy… . I went down to the police department … to make sure the Dallas police didn’t involve any foreign country in the assassination.”

At the very start of his presidency, Johnson had acted to prevent what he thought could potentially be global catastrophe. It was a measure that will surely endure as an act of sanity and statesmanship. Nevertheless, the new President himself would come to suspect there had been a conspiracy, and that Castro had been involved. He was to share variations on that theme with at least five people, none of whom would feel free to speak publicly until after his death.

“I’ll tell you something that will rock you,” he told ABC TV’s Howard K.
Smith in 1968, just before the end of his own presidency, “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first… . It will all come out someday.” Out of office, during an interview with CBS’s Walter Cronkite, he said he had never been “completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections… . I don’t think we ought to discuss the suspicions, because there’s not any hard evidence that Oswald was directed by a foreign government… . He was quite a mysterious fellow, and he did have connections that bore examination.”
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In 1971, over coffee with Leo Janos, one of his former speechwriters, he said he had “never believed Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.” He explained that the United States “had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” and speculated that the assassination had been retaliation for the CIA’s efforts. Finally, not long before his own death in 1973, he told Hearst columnist Marianne Means that he thought Oswald had shot his predecessor “because he was under either the influence or the orders of Castro.”
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Kennedy’s successor had spoken off the record, surely guessing that one or all of his listeners would publish his remarks once he was gone. So they did, and it was tantalizing stuff. Contrary to what Johnson had told ABC’s Smith, however, evidence that Castro had a hand in the assassination has not “all come out.”

What really triggered Johnson’s suspicion, encouraging the notion of a Castro hit, was an account he heard in 1967 from the columnist Drew Pearson—as had others, including Earl Warren. Pearson and his colleague Jack Anderson, for their part, had received their information from a prominent Washington attorney named Edward Morgan. Morgan, in turn, was retailing a story offered by his client—none other than John Roselli, the Mafia gangster who had helped the CIA in the early plots to kill Castro.

Top
mobsters do not push to get stories into the press out of a sense of public duty. Roselli’s motive? The House Assassinations Committee, noting that his story of Cuba-related skullduggery coincided with the mobster’s efforts to avoid prosecution and deportation back to Italy, thought it possible that Roselli “manipulated public perception of the plots … to get the CIA to intervene in his legal problems, as the price for his agreeing to make no further disclosures.”

The story Roselli peddled had three main elements: that mobsters had at one point been recruited to assist the CIA in attempting to assassinate Castro, that Robert Kennedy may have approved efforts to kill the Cuban leader, and that Castro riposted by sending assassins to the United States to kill President Kennedy. The first two elements, as described in these pages, were factual. The third element, however, had no substance to it. The best Roselli came up with to support his allegation of Castro involvement was that he and associates had received “feedback furnished by [unidentified] sources close to Castro.” This was a slender reed on which to hang the allegation that preoccupied Johnson to the end of his life.
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On the basis of barely any solid information, however, the insinuation that Castro had a hand in the Kennedy assassination proved durable.

There was something that appeared to nourish the suspicion that Castro retaliated against President Kennedy, a statement the Cuban leader himself had reportedly made two months before the assassination.

On the night of September 7, 1963, while attending a reception at the
Brazilian Embassy in Havana, Castro had settled down in a chair and uttered a stream of vituperation against John F. Kennedy. He had called the President “a cretin … the Batista of his times … the most opportunistic American President of all time.” He had denounced recent exile raids and said—according to the report filed by Daniel Harker of Associated Press—“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they
are
aiding
terrorist
plans
to
eliminate
Cuban
leaders,
they
themselves
will not be
safe
[author’s emphasis].”
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Had the Cuban leader very loudly issued a public warning—one he wanted to be heard in Washington—that he was aware of American plans to kill him or senior colleagues, and would respond in kind? The Cuban leader was to deny it repeatedly, most formally in 1978 to House Assassinations Committee members and staff who visited Havana.

“I said,” he asserted, referring to the much-quoted comment, “something like those plots start to set a very bad precedent … that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions … but I did not mean to threaten… . [It was] rather, like warning that we knew … I didn’t say it as a threat… . For three years, we had known there were plots against us … the conversation came about very casually, you know.”

The idea that Cuba could have been involved in President Kennedy’s death, Castro said, was “insane … I never heard anyone suggest or even speculate about a measure of that sort, because who could think of the idea of organizing the death of the President of the United States? That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have been trying to prevent all these years… . What could we gain from a war with the United States? The United States would lose nothing. The destruction would have been here.”

Cuba’s
Marxist policy, Castro told other interviewers, left “no room for liquidation of leaders of any social system through terrorist acts.” During the bitter struggle to overthrow Batista, Castro’s forces did not try to kill the hated dictator. In the fall of 1963, in light of the secret dialogue about accommodation, would it have made sense for Castro to plot Kennedy’s death? Had he been so duplicitous, he told the Committee, U.S. retaliation would almost certainly have swept away the revolution and Castro with it. Castro was aware too, that, even had Cuba’s role not been discovered, there was the possibility that a successor to Kennedy would prove as tough or even tougher toward Cuba.

There is another reason to doubt that Castro’s reported remark at the Brazilian Embassy was a real threat to President Kennedy’s life, a reason he did not articulate himself. Had he really intended harm to the President, would Castro have announced it to the press two months in advance?

The Assassinations Committee considered the fact that news of Castro’s “threat” remark had been published in New Orleans just a few weeks before Oswald’s trip to Mexico City. If Oswald read the story, might he have convinced himself that killing the President would make him a sort of revolutionary hero?

That idea hardly squared with the consistent evidence that Oswald thought well of President Kennedy. In custody after the assassination, asked whether he thought Cuba would be better off with the President dead, Oswald replied that, “since the President was killed someone would take his place, perhaps Vice President Johnson, and … his views would probably be largely the same as those of President Kennedy.”

Oswald’s
statements before the assassination carry more weight, but leave the same impression. Asked in the radio debate in New Orleans whether he agreed with Castro’s remarks that President Kennedy was a “ruffian and a thief,” Oswald said he did not agree with that wording. He thought, however, that the CIA and the State Department had made “monumental mistakes” over Cuba.

Lieutenant Martello, the police intelligence officer who spoke with Oswald after the street fracas in New Orleans, recalled that Oswald “in no way demonstrated any animosity or ill-feeling toward President Kennedy… . He showed in his manner of speaking that he liked the President.” No one ever would make a credible allegation that the alleged assassin had anything but good to say about John F. Kennedy.