JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (84 page)

Kennedy then issued a challenge and a promise to Castro. He said that “a small band of conspirators” had made “Cuba a victim of foreign imperialism, an instrument of the policy of others, 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 this barrier is removed, we will be ready and anxious to work with the Cuban people in pursuit of those progressive goals which a few short years ago stirred their hopes and the sympathy of many people throughout the hemisphere.”
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Kennedy’s final message to Castro was a promise that if he stopped what Kennedy regarded as Cuba’s covert action in support of Soviet policies in Latin America, then “everything was possible” between the United States and Cuba. On the same day he made this pledge, November 18, his representative Attwood took a further step toward détente by agreeing with Vallejo by phone (with Castro listening in) to set an agenda for a Kennedy–Castro dialogue.
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Attwood said that when he reported on the call to the White House the next day, he was told by Bundy that “once an agenda had been agreed upon, the president would want to see me and decide what to say to Castro. [Bundy] said the president would be making a brief trip to Dallas but otherwise planned to be in Washington.”
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Kennedy was ready to work out the specific elements of his dialogue with Castro as soon as he returned from Dallas.

However, the CIA was just as dedicated to undermining the words John Kennedy had already spoken as it was to making sure he would never speak again. The Agency immediately began propagating its own version of the November 18 speech, in combination with its efforts to kill both Kennedy and Castro.

In early September, the CIA set in motion yet another assassination plot against Castro, this one meant to serve ultimately as a way to blame Robert Kennedy for the killing of his own brother. The CIA’s Castro/RFK scheme utilized its key undercover agent in Cuba, Rolando Cubela, who was known by the code-name AM/LASH. Rolando Cubela was no ordinary agent but a Cuban political figure whom Fidel Castro trusted. Cubela had fought beside Castro in the Cuban Revolution. He then held various posts in the revolutionary government but became disillusioned by Castro’s alliance with the Soviet Union. In 1961 he was recruited by the CIA, which nurtured carefully its secret relationship with a Castro associate who also had experience as an assassin. In 1959 Cubela had shot to death Batista’s head of military intelligence.
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Thus, the CIA’s Cubela plot was, as Castro assessed it years later, “one that had many possibilities of success because that individual had access to us.”
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On October 29, 1963, Rolando Cubela met at a CIA safe house in Paris with Desmond Fitzgerald, chief of the CIA’s Special Affairs staff. In one of the CIA’s most blatant attempts to destroy both Kennedy brothers, Fitzgerald, using a false name, posed as a U.S. senator representing Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
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The Church Committee, following the CIA’s top-secret
Inspector General’s Report
, discovered that the Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms, had “agreed that Fitzgerald should hold himself out as a personal representative of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.”
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As the CIA’s own internal report admitted blandly, Helms had also decided “it was not necessary to seek approval from Robert Kennedy for Fitzgerald to speak in his name.”
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The CIA’s impersonation worked, convincing Cubela that he had been authorized by the Attorney General’s representative to assassinate Castro. Fitzgerald then put in a special order for Cubela of a poison pen device from the CIA’s Operations Division of the Office of Medical Services: “a ball-point rigged with a hypodermic needle . . . designed to be so fine that the victim would not notice its insertion.”
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On November 22, according to the
Inspector General’s Report
, “it is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro”
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—acting falsely once again in the name of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. As the Church Committee discovered, Cubela’s CIA handler told him that Desmond Fitzgerald, whom Cubela knew as “Robert Kennedy’s representative,” had helped write the president’s speech that was delivered in Miami on November 18. Cubela was informed “that the passage about the ‘small band of conspirators’ was meant as a green light for an anti-Castro coup.”
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The CIA, by reversing the meaning of Kennedy’s speech to motivate its own hired assassin, created a dogma of disinformation that it would disseminate for decades—that the Miami speech meant an encouragement to murder, not dialogue. The CIA’s further device of hiring Cubela in the name of Robert Kennedy to assassinate Castro laid the foundation for the repeated claim that Castro, to preempt the threat on his own life, ordered JFK’s murder—and that RFK had therefore triggered his own brother’s assassination.

When Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., learned years later of the murderous twist the CIA had put on the speech he helped write, he commented: “On its face the passage was obviously directed against Castro’s extracontinental ties and signaled that, if these were ended, normalization was possible; it was meant in short as assistance to Attwood [for a dialogue with Castro], not to Fitzgerald [for assassinating him]. This was the signal that Richard Goodwin, the chief author of the speech, intended to convey.”
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President Kennedy stated the purpose of his Miami speech when he first spoke to his speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, about it. The speech’s audience would be the Inter-American Press Association, which Sorensen knew was “a very tough anti-Castro group.”
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Yet Kennedy told Sorensen he had another audience in mind: Fidel Castro. Sorensen said later that the president specifically wanted “a speech that would open a door to the Cuban leader.”
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That is precisely the way in which Fidel Castro understood Kennedy’s words—as an open door.

In a speech in Cuba on November 23, 1963, Premier Castro reflected on President Kennedy’s death the day before. He took a special interest in JFK’s November 18 Miami speech, recognizing that it signaled an opening to himself and thus posed a threat to those opposed to rapprochement. Citing wire service reports, he noted the exile community’s hostile reaction to the speech:

“And so, a series of cables. Here ‘Miami, Florida—The Cuban exiles waited tonight in vain for a firm promise from President Kennedy to take energetic measures against the communist regime of Fidel Castro.’

“It says: ‘They waited tonight in vain for a firm promise’ . . . Many met in the offices of the revolutionary organizations and in their homes, to listen to President Kennedy over the radio . . . They listened when the President said: ‘We in this hemisphere must also use every resource at our command to prevent the establishment of another Cuba in this hemisphere.’
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That is, they did not accept the fact he said ‘to prevent the establishment of another Cuba in this hemisphere,’ because they thought that it carried with it the idea of accepting one Cuba. Many exiles had hopes of more vigorous statements to liberate Cuba from communism . . . ”
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Like the exiles, Castro understood at once the nuance of the carefully written phrase, “to prevent the establishment of
another
Cuba in this hemisphere” (emphasis added). What was cause for bitterness in the exiles was cause for hope in Castro, the hope of dialogue with the enemy, and peace. He continued his commentary on the press reports of the president’s speech:

“‘Miami Beach: Latin American newspaper publishers and editors in response to the speech delivered by President Kennedy tonight . . . said that he had not taken a strong enough position against the communist regime of Fidel Castro.’

“[Another newspaper says:] ‘Kennedy now refuses to allow Cuban exiles to launch attacks against Cuba from U.S. territory, and in fact uses U.S. air and naval power to maintain Castro in power.’ . . . That is to say, they accuse Kennedy of using naval and air power to maintain Castro in power.

“. . . The UPI overflowed with information as it had never done before, picking up all the criticisms of Kennedy because of his Cuban policy . . .

“How strange it is really that the assassination of President Kennedy should take place at a time when there was unanimous agreement of opinion against certain aspects of his policy. How strange all this is.”
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Castro also commented on the strangeness of the wire service reports the day before that had instantly identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin. On November 23, 1963, he asked brilliantly obvious questions about Oswald that have been suppressed in the U.S. media from then until now.

“Can anyone who has said that he will disclose military secrets [as Oswald said to the Soviet Union] return to the United States without being sent to jail? . . .

“How strange that this former marine should go to the Soviet Union and try to become a Soviet citizen, and that the Soviets should not accept him, that he should say at the American Embassy that he intended to disclose to the Soviet Union the secrets of everything he learned while he was in the U.S. service and that in spite of this statement, his passage is paid by the U.S. Government . . . He goes back to Texas and finds a job. This is all so strange!”
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Fidel Castro recognized “CIA” written all over Lee Harvey Oswald and the disinformation on him that was being sent around the world soon after the assassination. The Dallas setup was obvious to someone as familiar with CIA plots as Fidel Castro was. On the night before Oswald was killed and silenced forever, Castro’s questions pointed beyond Oswald to an unspeakable source of the crime:

“Who could be the only ones interested in this murder? Could it be a real leftist, a leftist fanatic, at a moment when tensions had lessened, at a moment when McCarthyism was being left behind, or was at least more moderate, at a moment when a nuclear test ban treaty is signed, at a moment when [presidential] speeches [that] are described as weak with respect to Cuba were being made?”
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In the years to come, Fidel Castro would conclude that Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy had negotiated a correct way out of the missile crisis, in spite of his own opposition. He would then admit honestly that he had been too blind to see a liberating way out at the time. In a 1975 interview, he acknowledged that he had been “enormously irritated” by the way in which the crisis was resolved, with no guarantee of Cuba’s security against a U.S. invasion. “But if we are realistic,” he added, “and we go back in history, we realize that ours was not the correct posture.”
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Upon further reflection he had come to feel “history has proven that the Soviet position [of withdrawing its missiles in return for a no-invasion pledge] was the correct one” and that Kennedy’s “promise not to invade Cuba [turned out to be] a real promise and everyone knows that. That is the truth.”
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JFK’s successors in the White House adhered to that promise, even though they failed to follow up on his beginning negotiations with Castro.

Castro had seen Kennedy change as president: “I have an impression of Kennedy and of Kennedy’s character, but I formed it over the years that he was President from different gestures, different attitudes. We mustn’t forget the speech he made at American University several months prior to his death, in which he admitted certain truths and spoke in favor of peace and relaxation of tensions. It was a very courageous speech and it took note of a series of international realities . . . This was Kennedy after two years in the presidency, who felt sure of his reelection, a Kennedy who dared make decisions—daring decisions . . .

“One of the characteristics of Kennedy was courage. He was a courageous man. A man capable of taking a decision one way or another, a man capable of revising a policy, because he had the courage to do so.”
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Speaking to members of Congress who visited Cuba in 1978, Castro said of his former enemy, “I can tell you that in the period in which Kennedy’s assassination took place Kennedy was changing his policy toward Cuba . . . To a certain extent we were honored in having such a rival . . . He was an outstanding man.”
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Julia Ann Mercer, a twenty-three-year-old employee of Automat Distributors in Dallas, drove into Dealey Plaza at about 11:00 a.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963. It was an hour and a half before the president’s motorcade would pass through. While Mercer’s car was stalled by heavy traffic in what would soon become a killing zone, her attention was drawn to a green pickup truck parked up on the curb to her right.

As Mercer watched, a man walked around to the back of the pickup. He reached in and pulled out a rifle case wrapped in paper. The man carried what was apparently a rifle up a slope that would soon become known as the grassy knoll.
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