Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (32 page)

Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who later became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers, was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy when the missile crisis ended. He was struck by the “fury” within the Air Force after the Kennedy-Khrushchev settlement. “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” Ellsberg recalled. “Not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup—I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.”

The CIA also knew the missile crisis was a turning point on Cuba. When Kennedy gave Khrushchev “assurances against [the] invasion of Cuba,” CIA official George McManus wrote in a memo on November 5, “Operation Mongoose died.” Mongoose had always been more for show, McManus noted, a smoke and mirrors operation designed “to remove the political stain left on the president by the Bay of Pigs failure.” But now, the CIA bleakly concluded, the Kennedy administration was dropping even the pretense of overthrowing Castro.

For those militants who were part of the massive juggernaut organized to destroy the Castro regime, the peaceful resolution of the missile crisis was a betrayal worse than the Bay of Pigs. They watched the U.S government go to the brink of launching a devastating assault on Cuba, only to see Kennedy nimbly sidestep the final reckoning at the last minute. It was the closest they would get to realizing their political dreams, and they had been crushed. “Talk about the word treason at the Bay of Pigs, this was even bigger for us, the people involved,” said Rafael Quintero, who was one of the sixty commandos recruited by Harvey to parachute into Cuba during the missile crisis.

As the year 1962 came to an end, the world was in a safer orbit. Those thirteen sleepless days and nights had won John Kennedy his place of glory in history. “People no longer thought that world war between the Soviet Union and the United States was inevitable,” Sorensen observed years later. The young president had navigated his way through the most dangerous shoals ever faced by an American leader, tacking just enough one way to avoid impeachment or a coup and sailing just enough the other way to avoid nuclear annihilation. Afterward, there was a shift in the world’s mood, a hint of light through the iron clouds that had been darkening the planet since the start of the Cold War’s long, deadly slog. Like men elated by a narrow escape from death, Kennedy and Khrushchev felt emboldened to pursue peace with a new vigor.

Kennedy and Khrushchev had drawn closer to each other during the thirteen-day ordeal, exchanging private letters and confidential messages. JFK was especially moved by one letter, a “cry from the heart,” as one U.S. diplomat called it, in which Khrushchev pleaded that the Russian people were neither “barbarians” nor “lunatics” and wanted to live as much as the American people. Therefore it was up to Kennedy and him to stop tugging on the “knot of war” before it became so tight that neither man could untie it. Khrushchev later said that he developed “a deep respect” for Kennedy during the crisis. “He didn’t let himself become frightened, nor did he become reckless…. He showed real wisdom and statesmanship when he turned his back on right-wing forces in the United States who were trying to goad him into taking military action against Cuba.”

There was more understanding than ever between the two leaders. But both men were increasingly estranged from their own governments. As Khrushchev had steered his country toward a peaceful way out of the crisis, his military advisors had “looked at me as though I was out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor.” But the Soviet leader had defiantly pursued his course. “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruin, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?”

It was a strange and perilous turning point in the Cold War, a time when the leaders of the two nuclear powers found themselves out of step with their own national security bureaucracies. Khrushchev was acutely aware that Soviet political history was an epic of blood and treachery, of sudden, violent exits from the stage. But he was not the only superpower leader who feared for his own safety.

A
thunderous roar erupted from the stadium crowd as the glamorous president and first lady glided into the Orange Bowl in a gleaming white convertible. A sea of Cuban and American flags flapped wildly in the stands. John F. Kennedy strode briskly across the grass to the ranks of men in crisp khaki uniforms, greeting them and shaking their hands. Some of the men were on crutches, but they stood proudly erect in the dazzling Miami sunshine. It was Saturday morning, December 29, 1962. The men of Brigade 2506, survivors of the Bay of Pigs and Castro’s prisons, were finally free and Kennedy was there to welcome them home. Several of his advisors had strongly warned the president against going to the Orange Bowl ceremony, including Kenny O’Donnell, who worried about the political fallout from what would certainly be an emotionally volatile event. “Don’t go there,” he told Kennedy, when the president phoned him from the family’s Palm Beach mansion, where he was spending the Christmas holidays. “After what you’ve been through with Castro, you can’t make an appearance in the Orange Bowl and pay a tribute to those rebels. It will look as though you’re planning to back them in another invasion of Cuba.” But Bobby—always more febrile on the subject of Cuba than Jack—convinced his brother to go. It turned out to be a disastrous decision.

When one of the Brigade leaders, Erneido Oliva, presented Kennedy with the rebels’ flag, which they had hidden during their imprisonment, the normally reserved JFK suddenly lost his cool. “Commander, I can assure you,” he declaimed in a rising voice, “that this flag will be returned to this Brigade in a free Havana.”

The Brigade members, more than eleven hundred strong, instantly shot to their feet, cheering lustily. Shouts of “Guerra! Guerra!” and “Libertad! Libertad!” swept the stadium. Some rebels broke down in tears.

Kennedy’s advisors were stunned. Goodwin, who had written the Orange Bowl speech, later said that JFK went “off script…that line about bringing back the flag to a free Cuba was not in the text. He was carried away by the moment.” But a declassified CIA memo dated December 28, 1962, reveals that the dramatic flag exchange was carefully choreographed in advance by Bobby Kennedy and exile leaders. In any case, JFK’s warlike cry was O’Donnell’s worst fear come true. The president’s eruption seemed to promise that the United States would back another invasion of the island. “Diplomatically, it was the worst possible gesture that a president of the United States could have made at that time,” he later wrote.

JFK himself soon realized his mistake. A few days later, he met with reporters in his Palm Beach house to clarify his Cuba policy. His administration had no intention of supporting another rebel invasion or imposing a new regime on Cuba, Kennedy made clear, unless Castro committed his own dramatic act of aggression. Once again, the president had blown wind into the Cuban rebels’ sails, only to quickly deflate their billowing hopes. It was the same ambivalent pattern that had characterized administration policy since the Bay of Pigs. The Kennedys would talk tough about the Castro regime and stoke Cuban exiles’ passions, and then tug sharply backwards on the reins of war.

The Kennedy two-step on Cuba contained a certain political logic—it was intended to restrain Khrushchev and Castro’s Latin American ambitions and defuse right-wing pressures at home, while stopping short of war. But it inflamed tempers in the Cuban exile community, where the Kennedy name became synonymous with betrayal. A violent rage began to fester in Miami’s political tropics, a shadowy world where shifting alliances of exiles, gangsters, and spies plotted labyrinthine conspiracies and dreamed of revolutionary glory. During JFK’s Orange Bowl appearance, a would-be assassin lurked in the crowd, carrying a duffel bag with a disassembled, scoped rifle. The Secret Service and Miami police were later tipped off about the suspect, who was described as a young Cuban male with a strong muscular build, but were unable to track him down.

By the summer of 1963, the whirl of intrigue in the anti-Castro underground was reaching a fever pitch. Confusion reigned as the Kennedys tried to impose control over the action-oriented Cuban exile groups like the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE) and Alpha 66, turning off and then on their raids against Cuba as it suited administration policy. The CIA claimed these anti-Castro groups were out of its control, but the rebels were heavily dependent on agency funding and it was never certain whether the groups’ frequent defiance of Kennedy policy was in fact instigated by their spymasters in Langley and Miami.

The DRE was a particular favorite of the CIA. Founded in 1954 as a Catholic student group militantly opposed to the dictator Batista, it later shifted its underground operations against Castro, moving its headquarters to Miami in 1960. The group’s most notorious exploit—a nighttime August 1962 raid when two of its speedboats opened fire on a beachfront Havana hotel in an assassination attempt on Castro—was explained away by the State Department as an act of freelance buccaneering that was executed without the government’s knowledge or support. But, in fact, the daring raid had been carefully plotted at the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami.

These were strange days marked by the emergence of mysterious characters. In August 1963, the DRE became entangled with a puzzling young man named Lee Harvey Oswald. He presented himself to the group’s New Orleans chapter as a sympathizer with the anti-Castro cause, but then created a spectacle by handing out pro-Castro leaflets and scuffling with DRE members in the street. Was the mysterious ex-Marine, who had defected to the Soviet Union and had then returned to the United States with surprising ease, a left-wing adventurer of some sort—or was he playing out some clandestine role with the CIA-backed DRE? Once again, the truth was murky.

The DRE was not the only Cuban exile group that crossed paths with Oswald that summer. According to Bay of Pigs veteran Angelo Murgado, he and a team of fellow Cuban exiles not only observed Oswald’s suspicious activities in New Orleans in August 1963, they reported on him to Bobby Kennedy.

Murgado was aligned with the Cuban exile faction led by Manuel Artime, the Brigade’s political leader. Like Murgado, Artime had fought briefly alongside Castro, but as a devout Jesuit-trained medical student, he had quickly grown alienated from Fidel’s communistic initiatives, and he fled the island with the CIA’s assistance. Artime was an artful operator. A conservative Catholic, he established himself as the CIA’s “golden boy,” building a close friendship with the reactionary agent Howard Hunt. But he uttered enough liberal pieties to also win the Kennedys’ support, telling one fellow Brigade leader that “the only way we could control the Communists in Cuba was with love” and lecturing U.S. officials that the government that replaced Castro must embrace social reforms to avoid sliding backwards to the medieval cruelty of the Batista era. Artime enjoyed access to Bobby Kennedy, meeting with him in his Washington office, at Hickory Hill, and at the family’s Palm Beach mansion. A secret Defense Department background sheet on the Brigade leader described him as “intelligent, aggressive, energetic, hotheaded and dogmatic”—a profile that also neatly fit the young attorney general. But RFK never fully trusted Artime, as he did Harry Ruiz Williams. He was too close to the CIA. And, in the end, Artime was all about Artime.

According to Murgado, he participated with Artime’s group in CIA-backed raids on Cuba, contaminating sugar cane fields and livestock with toxins. Some Brigade veterans enlisted in the U.S. military, but Murgado chose to join the CIA’s covert war on Havana. Trained in intelligence-gathering methods, he began to detect suspicious activity among some of his fellow exiles in the Miami Cuban community, a dangerous level of chatter aimed at President Kennedy. He took his concerns to Artime, who was initially reluctant to do anything about them for fear of betraying Cuban comrades. But, said Murgado, Artime finally agreed to set up a meeting with Bobby Kennedy where they could alert him to the threats against his brother.

Today, Angelo Murgado is a graying, stocky man in his mid-sixties with a voluble, colorful personality. The story he recounted was spiced with earthy vernacular and the rich tang of his Cuban accent. He spoke freely about his interactions with Bobby Kennedy, but abruptly closed the door on questions relating to fellow Cuban exiles and the assassination of JFK.

Murgado said that he and Artime first met with Bobby at the Kennedys’ Mediterranean-style, red tile–roofed mansion on North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach. The only other person who attended this meeting was another Bay of Pigs veteran affiliated with Artime named Manuel Reboso. (Artime died of cancer in 1977 and Reboso reportedly left the United States and could not be located.) At their first meeting, Murgado said he was stunned to see the
Rex
, the flagship of the CIA’s secret war on Cuba, anchored in the Atlantic waters outside the Kennedys’ home. “We used to load speedboats on the
Rex
, get within three miles of Cuba and then put the speedboats with raiders in the water,” Murgado told me. “I asked Manolo [Artime], ‘What the hell is the
Rex
doing outside Bobby’s home?’” To the exiles it was one more indication of how closely RFK was trying to hold the Cuba operation.

At the meeting, Murgado told the attorney general of his alarm about the growing anti-Kennedy passions in Cuban exile circles. “I told him that we have to keep a sharp look on these Cubans. I was afraid that one of our guys would go crazy. And he said, ‘You mean to tell me that some heat could come from the [anti-Castro] Cubans? And I said, ‘Yes. The same way that a lot of people are trying to hit Castro, there are a lot of people trying to hit the president of the United States…. We have a lot of crazy sons of bitches and they’re willing to pull anything.’”

Artime tried to downplay the threat, according to Murgado, but Bobby fixed on it with a scorching intensity. “He was a fanatic kamikaze about covering his brother’s ass. You could tell that was the main thing that drove him. Nothing would be able to get to the president if Bobby was standing in the middle. I wish I could have a brother who felt 20 percent of what Bobby felt about his brother. I would be the happiest cat in the world. That’s why I loved him so much. Even today, even right now, talking to you about him, I get very emotional. Cubans are fucking highly emotional. We’re talking about someone with a heck of a lot of conviction, and a heck of a pedigree.”

Murgado said that Bobby asked him to keep an eye on alarming Cuban exile activity and report back to him. “We asked, ‘Why don’t you tell the president and use the CIA or FBI?’ And he said, no, no, no—he didn’t trust any of the agencies. And he didn’t want to load his brother down with this situation. So we went outside the CIA and we did this on a personal basis with Bobby.” The attorney general paid Murgado’s expenses out of his own pocket, according to the Bay of Pigs veteran. “He would ask us, ‘What did you guys spend?’ And we’d say, ‘$86.05.’” Murgado could not produce any proof of these payments. But setting up private intelligence operations that he tightly controlled was a well-established practice of Bobby Kennedy’s throughout his political career.

In the summer of 1963, Murgado’s surveillance work led him to New Orleans, where he came across a curious gringo named Lee Harvey Oswald. Murgado and his compadres watched Oswald one day as he distributed his pro-Castro propaganda on the street. They later saw stacks of Oswald’s pamphlets in the office of Carlos Bringuier, one of the local DRE delegates who had confronted Oswald in a raucous shouting match that New Orleans police would report appeared staged. (Bringuier was a vehemently anti-Kennedy exile leader who had vowed to defy the administration’s crackdown on his group’s Cuba raids.)

Murgado’s team came to the conclusion that Oswald was an FBI informant. “He was a peon in a game run by what I call ‘the invisible government.’” To shed light on Oswald’s murky game, Murgado said they went so far as to contemplate eliminating him to see who would take his place in the clandestine operation. But they were warned by the FBI to leave town. “We were about to sanitize Oswald—you know, kill the motherfucker!—and the FBI stopped us.”

After returning to Florida, Murgado met with Bobby again at his Palm Beach house, where he reported on his surveillance targets, including the mysterious Oswald. He showed Kennedy newspaper photos taken of Oswald handing out his pro-Castro pamphlets. He told the attorney general that as far as he could determine Oswald was tied to the FBI. Bobby had never heard of Oswald, according to Murgado, but he did not seem concerned about him because of his apparent government role and the conversation quickly moved on to other matters. Murgado would not think seriously about Oswald again until November 22.

Murgado is indisputably a colorful character. He said that he changed his name to Angelo Kennedy in the 1960s in memory of the fallen president he had served. He admitted that, after JFK’s assassination, he and the rest of Manuel Artime’s band became so cynical about the U.S. government that they continued to accept CIA subsidies to overthrow Castro while running contraband liquor, tobacco, and guns out of Nicaragua. (Despite reports to the contrary, he insisted they did not traffic in drugs.) After his career as a self-described “mercenary” came to an end, Murgado worked as a Miami building code inspector. In 1999 he was arrested for pocketing cash in return for zoning favors, later pleading guilty to the bribery charges. (He struck a deal with prosecutors that kept him out of jail.)

All this made Murgado a controversial figure in assassination circles when he suddenly popped into the spotlight in 2005 before just as quickly disappearing back into the shadows. But the anti-Castro underworld was never the exclusive domain of shining knights. It had more than its share of tarnished heroes and intrepid rogues, as does any exile community in the shadow of American empire that runs on broken dreams and ruthless ambitions. Despite his checkered past, Murgado’s story about Oswald and RFK has not been refuted.