JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (24 page)

Thanks to Donovan’s own fortuitous gift to Castro of a harmless diving suit, his dialogue partner survived the plot and their April conversations transpired hopefully. Castro raised with Donovan the issue of future U.S. policy. Donovan noted Kennedy’s recent steps in restricting exile groups. Castro in turn said pointedly that his “ideal government was not to be Soviet oriented,” and asked how diplomatic ties with the United States might be resumed. Donovan asked Castro, “Do you know how porcupines make love?” Castro said, “No.” “The answer,” Donovan said, “is ‘very carefully.’”
[29]

In late April at Donovan’s recommendation, Castro granted ABC reporter Lisa Howard an interview.
[30]
On her return from Cuba, Howard innocently briefed the CIA in detail on Castro’s surprising openness toward Kennedy. She reported that when she asked Castro how a rapprochement between the United States and Cuba could be achieved, Castro said that “steps were already being taken.” Pressed further, he said, nodding toward Kennedy’s initiative, that he considered “the U.S. limitation on exile raids to be a proper step toward accommodation.” Howard concluded from the ten-hour interview that Castro was “looking for a way to reach a rapprochement with the United States Government.” She said Castro also indicated, however, “that if a rapprochement was wanted President John F. Kennedy would have to make the first move.”
[31]

Each of these Castro overtures for a new U.S.–Cuban relationship was noted word for word in a secret CIA memorandum written on May 1, 1963, by the Deputy Director of Plans (head of covert action) Richard Helms, that was not declassified until 1996. It was addressed to CIA Director John McCone. A scribbled “P saw” on the upper right-hand side of the document indicates it was read also by the president.
[32]
Thus we have become witnesses to Kennedy watching the CIA watching Castro approaching Kennedy, in response to Kennedy’s crackdown on the CIA’s covert-action anti-Castro groups. As the increasingly interested porcupines edged toward each other very carefully, the CIA’s chief of covert action was, as the president knew, monitoring very carefully their prickly courtship.

The CIA tried to block the door that could be seen opening through Howard’s interview. CIA Director John McCone argued that Howard’s approach to Cuba “would leak and compromise a number of CIA operations against Castro.”
[33]
In a May 2, 1963, memorandum to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, McCone urged that the “Lisa Howard report be handled in the most limited and sensitive manner” and “that no active steps be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time.”
[34]

As would become apparent years later from research into the background of Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA was then also setting in motion a covert operation in New Orleans to ensure there would never be a Kennedy–Castro rapprochement.

In April 1963, when John Kennedy responded to CIA duplicity by turning toward his enemy Fidel Castro, Lee Harvey Oswald was going through a transition of his own—a move from Dallas to New Orleans. Unlike Kennedy, Oswald chose not to turn in an independent direction, but in the course of his move to New Orleans to continue to be directed by others for their own purposes.

Oswald quickly found work in New Orleans at the Reily Coffee Company. It was owned by William B. Reily, a wealthy supporter of the CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council.
[35]
As researcher William Davy has shown by a recently declassified government document, Reily’s Coffee Company seems to have long been part of the CIA’s New Orleans network. According to a CIA memorandum dated January 31, 1964, “this firm [Reily’s] was of interest as of April 1949.”
[36]
In a 1968 interview with the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office, CIA contract employee Gerry Patrick Hemming “confirmed that William Reily had worked for the CIA for years.”
[37]
As Lee Harvey Oswald went to work in New Orleans, he was in the company of the Company.

The Reily Coffee Company was located at the center of the U.S. intelligence community in New Orleans, close by the offices of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
[38]
Directly across the street from Naval Intelligence and the Secret Service was another office that Oswald worked in, the detective agency of former FBI agent Guy Banister.
[39]

Guy Banister Associates functioned more as a covert-action center for U.S. intelligence agencies than it did as a detective agency. Banister’s office helped supply munitions for CIA operations ranging from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban exile attacks designed to ensnare Kennedy. Guns and ammunition littered the office.
[40]
CIA paramilitaries checked in with Banister on their way to and from nearby anti-Castro training camps. Daniel Campbell was an ex-Marine hired by Banister to assist in small arms training for the Cuban exiles and to inform on radical students at New Orleans colleges. Campbell later told researcher Jim DiEugenio, “Banister was a bagman for the CIA and was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami.”
[41]

Banister’s secretary and confidante Delphine Roberts said Lee Harvey Oswald came to Banister’s office sometime in 1963, ostensibly to fill out an application form to become one of Banister’s agents. Roberts told author Anthony Summers, “During the course of the conversation I gained the impression that he and Guy Banister already knew each other.”
[42]
Oswald and Banister then met behind closed doors for a long conversation. “I presumed then, and now am certain,” Roberts said, “that the reason for Oswald being there was that he was required to act undercover.”
[43]
Oswald was given the use of an office on the second floor, “above the main office where we worked,” Roberts said. “I was not greatly surprised when I learned he was going up and down, back and forth.”
[44]
Roberts noticed that Oswald had pro-Castro leaflets upstairs, and she later saw him passing them out on the street. When she complained to Banister about Oswald’s pro-Castro demonstrating, Banister said not to worry about him, “He’s with us, he’s associated with the office.”
[45]

Banister’s office became the base for a political theater that Oswald acted out on the streets of New Orleans during the summer of 1963, whose final meaning would not become apparent until November 22. Oswald had written in May to the New York headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), saying he planned to establish his own New Orleans branch of the pro-Castro organization. He was warned explicitly, by a letter from the FPCC national director, V. T. Lee, against provoking “unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters” in an atmosphere as politically hostile to their efforts as was that of New Orleans.
[46]
Oswald then pushed ahead and tempted fate on June 16 by passing out pro-Castro leaflets to the unlikely audience of sailors disembarking from an aircraft carrier, the USS
Wasp,
on the dock at the port of New Orleans. Oswald may have been smiling to himself at his efforts to stir up a
Wasp
’s nest for the FPCC. However, before he could provoke precisely the kind of incident he had been warned against, a patrolman in the harbor police ordered him to leave, and he did so.
[47]

In August, Oswald tried harder to make such an impact and, with the assistance of others, succeeded. He managed to dramatize his support for Fidel Castro to the entire city of New Orleans, in such a way as to highlight Oswald’s own public history as an expatriate Marine recently returned from his defection to the Soviet Union.

He began on August 5 by visiting Carlos Bringuier, a leader in the anti-Castro exile community. Bringuier was the New Orleans delegate of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), a group that a 1967 CIA memorandum described as “conceived, created, and funded by CIA.”
[48]
A House Select Committee on Assassinations report said “the DRE was, of all the anti-Castro groups, one of the most bitter toward President Kennedy for his [Cuban Missile Crisis] ‘deal’ with the Russians.”
[49]
Former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt testified before the House Committee that the DRE was “run” for the CIA by David Phillips,
[50]
the same CIA man behind the scenes who as “Maurice Bishop” had directed the Alpha 66 raids designed to push President Kennedy into war with Cuba. Carlos Bringuier’s specific duties in New Orleans for the CIA-run DRE were, as he told both Lee Harvey Oswald and the Warren Commission, “propaganda and information.”
[51]
In the summer of 1963, Oswald was a transparent collaborator in fulfilling Bringuier’s propaganda mission.

The story that Carlos Bringuier told the Warren Commission about his interactions with Oswald gave no hint of the CIA background the two men had in common—the key to interpreting the drama Bringuier narrated. He began his account by describing Oswald as a suspicious, unannounced visitor on August 5 to the New Orleans clothing store Bringuier managed. He said Oswald told him he was against Communism, had been in the Marine Corps, and “was willing to train Cubans to fight against Castro.”
[52]
Bringuier continued his story by saying he turned down Oswald, who he felt might be an infiltrator. Undeterred, Oswald returned the next day, and in Bringuier’s absence left Oswald’s Marine Corps training manual as a personal gift for the fight against Castro.

Oswald’s and Bringuier’s street theater occurred three days later. Bringuier said he was in his store when he was told about a demonstrator on Canal Street carrying a sign saying “Viva Fidel.” He and two Cuban friends rushed out and confronted the Fidel activist, who to Bringuier’s anger turned out to be the same man who had been offering to help him fight Castro, Lee Harvey Oswald. Then, as Bringuier described the scene to Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley J. Liebeler, “many people start to gather around us to see what was going on over there. I start to explain to the people what Oswald did to me, because I wanted to move the American people against him, not to take the fight for myself as a Cuban but to move the American people to fight him, and I told them that that was a Castro agent, that he was a pro-Communist, and that he was trying to do to them exactly what he did to us in Cuba, kill them and send their children to the execution wall . . .

“The people in the street became angry and they started to shout to him, ‘Traitor! Communist! Go to Cuba! Kill him!’ and some other phrases that I do not know if I could tell in the record.”

One of Bringuier’s friends snatched Oswald’s leaflets, tore them up, and threw them in the air.

“And I was more angry,” Bringuier continued, “I took my glasses off and I went near to him to hit him, but when he sensed my intention, he put his arm down as an X.”

Bringuier paused in his narrative to demonstrate to Liebeler the X Oswald had made by crossing his arms in front of him. Then Bringuier resumed: “[Oswald] put his face [up to mine] and told me, ‘O.K. Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.”

Ignoring in his story the almost friendly way in which Oswald had provoked him, Bringuier told Liebeler that he realized Oswald “was trying to appear as a martyr if I will hit him, and I decide not to hit him.”
[53]

A few seconds later two police cars pulled up. The street scene between the coolly controlled “pro-Castro demonstrator” and his three “opponents,” all players in a script they had not written, was suddenly over. The police officers arrested Oswald, Bringuier, and his two Cuban friends, and took all four to a police station, where they were charged with disturbing the peace. Bringuier and his friends were released on bond, and Oswald spent the night in jail. The three Cubans eventually had their charges dismissed. Oswald pled guilty and was fined $10.00.
[54]

From jail Oswald asked through the police to speak with an FBI agent. It was a strange request for an anti-government demonstrator. He then met with New Orleans Special Agent John Quigley for an hour and a half. Why? Quigley told the Warren Commission vaguely the following spring that he felt Oswald “was probably making a self-serving statement in attempting to explain to me why he was distributing this literature, and for no other reason.”
[55]

The Warren Commission was well aware, by the time of Quigley’s testimony, of another possible reason why Oswald might have wanted to meet with an FBI agent—that Oswald was on the same payroll, “employed by the F.B.I. at $200 per month from September of 1962 up to the time of the assassination,”
[56]
as stated by the commission’s general counsel J. Lee Rankin, at their closed-door meeting on January 27, 1964. The transcript of this remarkable session was classified “top secret” for a decade until researcher Harold Weisberg gained access to it through a legal battle and published all of it as his
Whitewash IV
in 1974. The purpose of the Warren Commissioners’ entire January 27 meeting was to deal with the disturbing information Rankin had received from Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr that “Oswald was an undercover agent for the F.B.I.”
[57]
Rankin called Carr’s report, with its specific payroll information, “a dirty rumor that is very bad for the Commission,” and said “it must be wiped out insofar as it is possible to do so by this Commission.”
[58]
The Commission did so by simply asking officials of the FBI, and the CIA as well (for whom Oswald was also said to have been an agent), to testify on whether Oswald had in fact been working for them. They said he had not.
[59]
Former CIA director Allen Dulles put their denials in a national security perspective at the January 27 meeting by saying frankly that the CIA employers of an agent “ought not tell it under oath.”
[60]
Dulles said that the same code of denial (or perjury, a word he didn’t use) applied to the FBI.
[61]
The January 27 meeting’s transcript is a revelation of how Allen Dulles, one of the master plotters of the Cold War and by logic a prime suspect in JFK’s murder, kept a bemused composure while guiding the circle of distinguished elders through the cover-up.