Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (37 page)

The House Assassinations Committee found “persuasive reasons to conclude that the Cuban government was not involved in the Kennedy assassination.” Were the multiple stories that seemed to link Oswald to Castro’s Cuba merely opportunistic efforts, after the fact, to turn the assassination to propaganda advantage? Or is it possible that some of them were part of a conspiracy designed to do away with President Kennedy and—by linking Oswald to Havana—provoke U.S. retaliation against Cuba, even at the risk of causing a nuclear conflict?

The evidence suggests that painting a track of guilt that led to Havana was deliberate, even perhaps preconceived.

At noon on November 25, the day after the real Oswald had been silenced forever, a young Nicaraguan named Gilberto Alvarado walked into the American Embassy in Mexico City.
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What he had to say was so important, he said, that he had to see the Ambassador himself. During a visit to the Cuban Consulate in mid-
September, he claimed, he had seen Oswald on a patio talking with a thin black man. They had then been joined by a tall Cuban who passed money to the black man. Then, Alvarado asserted, he heard the black man tell Oswald in English, “I want to kill the man.” Oswald replied, “You’re not man enough—I can do it.” To which the black man responded in Spanish, “I can’t go with you. I have a lot to do.” Oswald replied, “The people are waiting for me back there.” The black man then handed Oswald $6,500 in large-denomination notes, adding by way of apology, “This isn’t much.” And the supposed meeting ended.

Alvarado claimed he had tried to warn the Embassy about all this before the assassination, but had been rebuffed as a time waster. Now, his account set the wires humming between Mexico City and Washington. It seemed there could be something to it—CIA staff knew from surveillance coverage that an “Oswald” had visited the Cuban Consulate. Ambassador Thomas Mann, who had expressed suspicion of Cuba within hours of the assassination, urged his staff to give Alvarado’s tale serious attention.

Alvarado’s claim was flashed to Washington for the attention of the FBI and the State Department—and the White House, where it became one of the first pieces of “evidence” to sow the idea of a Castro conspiracy in the new President’s mind. Twenty-four hours later, the CIA reported information “from a sensitive and reliable source” that tended to confirm Alvarado’s story.

“In reading Oswald’s rather complete dossier,” Ambassador Mann explained in a later message, “I did not get an impression of a man who would kill a person he had never met for a cause, without offers from the apparatus to which he apparently belonged, when there was nothing in it for him. I therefore had a feeling—subjective and unproven to be sure—that either in Mexico or the United States someone had given him an assignment and money… .
Castro is the kind of person who would avenge himself in this way.” The Ambassador reminded Washington of the AP story of September that had quoted Castro as saying U.S. leaders would “not be safe.”

On November 27, the Embassy’s legal attaché relayed a press statement put out by a “former Cuban diplomat”—a prominent exile—that stretched what AP’s “threat” story had actually said. In the diplomat’s version, Castro had said, “Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves, since they, too, can be the victims of an attempt which will cause their death.”

Washington reacted very cautiously. An FBI supervisor, Laurence Keenan, was sent to Mexico with orders to damp down any suggestion of conspiracy. He stressed to Ambassador Mann that the FBI position was—as it was to remain—that Oswald and Oswald alone had killed the President. The State Department, for its part, sent Mann a telegram he never forgot. Years later, when interviewed by the author, he was still irritated by what he recalled as “an instruction from Washington to cease investigation.” Even as the Ambassador fumed, however, it was becoming apparent that there was something rum about Alvarado’s story.

Questioned by Mexican officials, the young Nicaraguan admitted that his story had been a fabrication. He had never seen Oswald, had not seen money change hands, had not tried to alert the American Embassy before the assassination. Then, however, when U.S. officials continued to show interest, he reverted to the original story and claimed that the Mexicans had pressured him into the retraction. A polygraph test, however, indicated that he might be lying. Alvarado then acknowledged that he “must be mistaken,” was uncertain when the incident had occurred, and said he had merely seen “someone who looked like Oswald.” Officials in Washington, DC, decided once and for all that there was nothing to the story.

In Mexico City, Ambassador
Mann still felt Alvarado should have been flown to the United States for further questioning. In that he was right. Having apparently lied made Alvarado no less relevant to the investigation. For the nature of his story, and his background, suggested that the attempt to tie Castro to the assassination had been no spur-of-the-moment impulse.

Consider Alvarado’s claim that he heard Oswald tell his companion, “You’re not man enough [to kill the man]. I can do it.” That echoed almost exactly what Silvia Odio in Dallas had been told by her mysterious anti-Castro visitor “Leopoldo.” Alvarado, too, quoted Oswald as having said that Cuban exiles “don’t have any guts … should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs.” The two accounts could be from the same bad film script—but by what scriptwriter?

Alvarado said he was a Nicaraguan intelligence agent, that he had been at the Cuban Embassy on a mission to try to get into Cuba. The Nicaraguans denied it, claiming to the contrary that he was a known Communist—an implausible suggestion to make about an individual who had tried to implicate Communist Cuba in the assassination. The Americans believed Alvarado was indeed a Nicaraguan agent. A CIA document notes that he had been a “regular informant of the Nicaraguan secret service, an officer of which has provided this agency with [Alvarado’s] reports for over a year.”

Then Nicaraguan dictator Luis Somoza was an avid supporter of the anti-Castro exiles, as was natural for Central America’s version of the former Cuban dictator Batista. His country had served as a principal assembly point for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and remained open house for the CIA and its Cuban protégés. Nicaragua hosted anti-Castro leader
Manuel Artime, who commanded two bases in the country and had a role in the CIA plot to kill Castro using Rolando Cubela. Artime’s associate and friend was Howard Hunt, the Agency propaganda specialist who said he had been one of the first to recommend that Castro be killed.
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In spite of the holes in Alvarado’s claim about Oswald, his allegation was brought to President Johnson’s attention on at least three occasions and for some time remained a live issue.
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Even as that allegation lost its head of steam, moreover, others proliferated.
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On December 2, a new Mexico City witness came up with a variation on Alvarado’s theme. Pedro Gutiérrez, a credit investigator, sent a letter to President Johnson saying that that he, too, had seen Oswald being handed money—by his account—outside the Cuban Embassy. Gutiérrez’s story, which caused further extensive investigation, led nowhere. He turned out to be a zealous anti-Communist with a background of agitation.

Within a day of Gutiérrez’s allegation, a “sensitive source” told the CIA about a Cubana Airlines flight that had supposedly been delayed for hours at the Mexico City airport on the night of the assassination—waiting for a mysterious passenger. When he at last arrived, by private aircraft, he had allegedly traveled on to Havana concealed from fellow passengers in the pilot’s cabin. Checks revealed that, in fact, the Cuban aircraft had left for Havana before the second plane arrived. Another claim that led nowhere.
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Some allegations had the ring of calculated black propaganda. A prominent exile writer, Salvador Díaz-Versón, claimed that while in Mexico City, Oswald had met at restaurant with the Cuban Ambassador and Sylvia Durán, the secretary who dealt with his visa application. His source for this,
Díaz said, was a fellow exile journalist living in Mexico, Eduardo Borrell Navarro. Interviewed for the author, Borrell said he, in turn, had gotten his information from anti-Castro Cubans—they had been surveilling their pro-Castro counterparts before the assassination. Borrell spoke of his own long and close relationship with officials at the U.S. Embassy, and said his sources were close to U.S. intelligence.

Along with all these claims, there was a matter that an Assassinations Committee report characterized as an allegation that “although related to certain facts, cannot be substantiated.” Late on the night of the assassination, according to former U.S. diplomat Clare Booth Luce, the wife of wealthy publisher and editor-in-chief of
Time
and
Life
magazines, Henry Luce, she had received a call from a Cuban exile she knew well. Like some other wealthy Americans, Mrs. Luce supported the anti-Castro movement by funding one of the motorboats the exiles used for raids on Castro’s Cuba. The man phoning was one of her protégés, and he had called from New Orleans.

The purpose of the call was to tell Mrs. Luce that her exile protégé and two comrades had met Oswald during the summer, that he had tried to infiltrate their group, and had offered his services to help kill Castro. The exiles had unmasked him as a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, however, taken pictures of his street actions and taped him talking about Cuba within his “communist cell.” According to Mrs. Luce’s caller, Oswald had made “several” trips to Mexico City and had returned with funds.

With that, Mrs.
Luce said, the voice from New Orleans launched into a familiar litany. Oswald had boasted he was “a crack marksman and could shoot anybody—including the President or the Secretary of the Navy.”
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There was “a Cuban Communist assassination team at large and Oswald was their hired gun.”

The Committee found that Mrs. Luce’s protégés in 1963 had been in the DRE, the exile group represented in New Orleans by Carlos Bringuier, who had taken part in the street fracas with Oswald over his Fair Play for Cuba leafleting.
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Here again, then, in a call to the wife of a man at the top of
Time
—that mighty media outlet—was the scenario of a Communist Oswald who supposedly bragged about his marksmanship and spoke of killing the President. Shades of the Silvia Odio incident, and the Mexico City allegations.

The most revealing detail of the Luce episode, however, was the reference by her caller to Oswald’s travel to Mexico City. Mrs. Luce was sure she had received the call late on the night of the assassination—she recalled the phone ringing while she and her husband were watching the television coverage. Oswald’s visit to Mexico City, however, did not become known to the public until forty-eight hours
later
. On the night of November 22, the record indicates, Oswald’s visit to Mexico City was known only to Oswald himself, perhaps to his wife, Marina—and to U.S. intelligence.

If the call to Mrs. Luce was another fable designed to incriminate Castro’s Cuba, ready-made to generate massive publicity,
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it suggests collaboration between the exiles and an element of American intelligence.
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Tracking back, the indications are that an effort to link Oswald firmly to Castro’s Cubans had begun as early as September, in Mexico City.

* * *

Oscar
Contreras, the then law student who said he was buttonholed in the university cafeteria by an Oswald other than the authentic Oswald, offered food for thought.
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Perhaps he was being over-suspicious, Contreras told the author, but he had never been able to understand how—of all the thousands of students in Mexico City—the man who called himself Oswald picked on three who really did have contacts in the Cuban Embassy. Nothing about the evening, or the moment, had had anything to do with Cuba.

Contreras recalled, too, how emphatically Cuban officials at the Consulate later warned them off seeing any more of Oswald. They did so, they said, because they thought even then that the young American might well be “some sort of provocateur, sent by the United States to go to Cuba with evil intent.” The Cuban Consul’s colleague, Alfredo Mirabal, recalled that his impression “from the very first moment was that it was in fact a provocation.” Disquieting leads suggest that the Cubans’ suspicion, voiced weeks before the assassination, was not mere paranoia.

According to Ernesto Rodríguez, who claimed to have been a CIA contract agent in Mexico City in 1963, Oswald had given both the Soviets and the Cubans information about a current CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro—had even talked about it on the telephone.
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He offered to share more information, Rodríguez said, were he granted a Cuban entry visa. The story fed into the theory that Castro may have responded to Oswald’s information by striking first—in Dallas.

Another account, if true, indicates flatly that a U.S. intelligence officer attempted to concoct information about Oswald in Mexico City. Exile leader Antonio Veciana, who said he saw Oswald in the company of his American contact, “Bishop,” just weeks before the
Mexico episode,
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added that—after the assassination—Bishop gave him a new task. “He asked me to get in touch with a cousin of mine who worked in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, Guillermo Ruiz. Bishop asked me to see if Ruiz would, for money, make statements stating that Lee Harvey Oswald had been at the Embassy a few weeks before the assassination. I asked him whether it was true that Oswald had been there, and Bishop replied that it did not matter whether he had or not. What was important was that my cousin, a member of the Cuban diplomatic service, should confirm that he had been.”

Veciana did have a cousin by marriage named Ruiz, who worked—fronting as a diplomat—for Castro’s intelligence service. According to Veciana, however, he was unable to contact Ruiz as quickly as Bishop had wished. Before he could do it, Bishop told him to “forget the whole thing and not to comment or ask any questions about Lee Harvey Oswald.”
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