Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (35 page)

Hall, alias “Lorenzo Pascillo,” was a thirty-three-year-old former U.S. Army sergeant who reportedly had training in counterintelligence. He was also said to have trained Cuban exiles at a camp on Lake Pontchartrain outside New Orleans—the same camp to which Oswald had allegedly been taken at one point. Hall had gone to Havana in 1959, before the fall of the Batista dictatorship, to work in the casino of the Capri Hotel, which was controlled by Santo Trafficante, one of the Mafia leaders who has been named in connection with killing President Kennedy. After the fall of the regime, by Hall’s own account, he and Trafficante shared a Quonset hut in a Castro detention camp.

Notes of Hall’s interviews with congressional investigators indicate that the CIA made contact with him the day after his release and repatriation. A CIA document says the interest in Hall was solely “for debriefing.” His son, however, said in court testimony that his father was for many years a CIA operative.

The Odio encounter remains today an incident that cannot be ignored yet resists explanation. The House Assassinations Committee’s firm conclusion, however, was that it believed the Odio sisters and accepted that they had indeed met a man who had been introduced as Leon Oswald and looked like Oswald. It was, as a Committee report noted in fine understatement, “a situation that indicates possible conspiratorial involvement.”

What sort of involvement? If Oswald was a genuine pro-Castro leftist, as the Committee thought, what was he doing at Odio’s home in the company of anti-Castro activists? The Committee
speculated—though without conviction—that Oswald, as part of a leftist assassination plot, perhaps associated with the exiles in order to implicate the anti-Castro side in the President’s murder. The other, contrary, interpretation, espoused by many researchers, is that anti-Castro operatives deliberately used Oswald, or the name of the real Oswald, to set him up as a fall guy for the assassination.
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Absent any certainty—except that the Odios’ account is credible, an unresolved part of the assassination story—we are left with the comments of two of the main protagonists.

“As it stands right now,” Loran Hall said in a taped 1977 interview, “there’s only two of us left alive—that’s me and Santo Trafficante. And as far as I’m concerned we’re both going to stay alive—because I ain’t going to say shit.”

Silvia Odio ended her interview with the author with a poignant thought. Asked what haunted her most about her experience all those years ago, she replied, “It is the thought that perhaps, somehow, I could have prevented the assassination.”

Countdown

“The
Kennedys were playing with fire.”

—former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, on the brothers’ duplicity over Cuba, 1994

I
n the fall of 1963, at the very time Odio was introduced to Oswald in Dallas, President Kennedy made moves in secret that, if discovered—as they likely were—offered those violently opposed to Castro greater cause than ever to take drastic action. On September 19, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson phoned the President with news of a remarkable development. Tentatively, through an obscure African diplomat and others, Fidel Castro let it be known that he was interested in reaching some sort of accommodation with the United States.

The Cuban leader’s message, very different from his public rantings, had been passed on—over coffee at U.N. headquarters—to William Attwood, Special Adviser to the American delegation. Attwood had previously met and talked with Castro and was well regarded by Kennedy. The sense of the message, passed on by Guinea’s ambassador to Cuba, was that Castro was uneasy about the degree to which Cuba had become tied to the Soviet Union, was at odds with his own hardliners, and wanted to redress the balance by finding an accommodation with the United States. It sounded as though he wanted talks about talks.

This had the
potential for breakthrough as momentous as, say, the first tentative contacts between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s. Kennedy responded rapidly, giving the go-ahead for contact between Attwood and Cuba’s delegate at the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga—on two conditions.
1
First, it should not appear that the United States had solicited the discussions and, second, any contacts were to be secret.

“Secret” meant that only those with need to know should be told. Kennedy was already in conflict with those in his own cabinet who opposed talk of withdrawal from Vietnam, and with those who looked sourly on his policy of global disengagement. Going soft on Cuba, moreover, would enrage those at the CIA who had for years been passionately involved in the fight to topple Castro. “Unfortunately,” Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson told Attwood, “the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.” To some at the State Department, too, the very idea of accommodation was heresy. The President wanted to find out more about the Castro approach, but he wanted it done quietly and at arm’s length.

Attwood already had a willing go-between for the coming contacts with Havana. This was Lisa Howard, an ABC News reporter who had interviewed Castro in Havana—and, moreover, had a sexual dalliance with him. She had told the President about the trip—including the bedroom encounter—on her return. “She mentioned that Castro hadn’t taken his boots off,” recalled the author Gore Vidal, who knew both Kennedy and Howard, “Jack liked details like that.” Much more seriously, the reporter had gained the impression that Castro was ready to talk, and had come back and reported as much—eventually in print. Now, Attwood recruited Howard to help with his mission, promising an exclusive story should anything come of the contacts.

On
September 23, the reporter engineered a cocktail party at her Manhattan apartment, to which Attwood and Lechuga were invited. At a discreet distance from other guests, the American and the Cuban talked cautiously for about half an hour. Lechuga indicated that progress might be possible, that Castro might want to meet with Attwood.

The following morning saw Attwood on an early shuttle to Washington, DC, and a meeting with Robert Kennedy, who agreed that contacts could be worthwhile. Then he and Lechuga met again. Through the month of October, as the days ticked by toward tragedy in Dallas, the secret diplomacy continued. Hoping to move things along, Attwood got the President to discuss Cuba with Jean Daniel, an eminent French journalist who was due soon to fly to Cuba to see Castro.

At their meeting, President Kennedy surprised Daniel by expressing vigorous approval for the basic principles of the Cuban revolution. The United States, he said, had been to blame for many of the evils of the old Batista regime. While warning that he would not tolerate Cuban subversion in Latin America, the President said he now “understood the Cubans.” He asked Daniel to come to see him again on his return, following the upcoming visit to Cuba, to brief him on his exchanges with Castro. Daniel was being used, he realized, as an “unofficial envoy.”

Meanwhile, Attwood’s secret diplomacy seemed to be getting somewhere. Castro’s trusted aide and personal physician, Rene Vallejo, suggested through Lisa Howard that Attwood fly to a one-on-one meeting with Castro at Varadero, on Cuba’s north coast.

On November 5, a recently released White House tape shows, Kennedy and National Security Adviser
McGeorge Bundy discussed how to move the matter forward. The President suggested getting Attwood “off the payroll,” so that—if leaked—any contact with Castro could appear unofficial, “deniable.” The President was interested, Attwood noted in his diary, in the possibility of “taking Castro “out of the Soviet fold … perhaps wiping out the Bay of Pigs and getting back to normal.”

The administration was playing a dangerous double game. A previous chapter of this book reviewed the likelihood that the Kennedy brothers had been aware of plans to kill Castro earlier in the presidency.
2
Through the fall of 1963, in the very weeks Kennedy was authorizing a dialogue with Castro, CIA officers again met with Castro’s aide Rolando Cubela, whom the Agency believed—mistakenly—to be a traitor set on the regime’s overthrow.

Several times in early September, Cubela and his CIA case officer Nestor Sanchez—who answered to the head of Cuba operations, Desmond FitzGerald—met at a safe house in Brazil. In early October they met again in France, at a house outside Paris. On October 11, Sanchez reported that Cubela wanted Robert Kennedy’s personal assurance that the United States would support “any activity” he might undertake against Castro. On October 29, FitzGerald himself flew to Paris and, representing himself as Robert Kennedy’s personal emissary, told Cubela that Washington would back any anti-Communist group that would “neutralize” the Cuban leadership. He and Cubela also discussed what weapon might be used to kill Castro, and Fitzgerald later approved weapons being provided.
3

There is no compelling reason to think that these CIA officers acted, as
Kennedy loyalists have maintained, without authority.
4
Documents and interviews made public since 2005 seem to indicate that there was also another plan in the works, one that envisaged a coup utilizing a second supposed traitor in Castro’s government apparatus. The game plans, both for the Cubela operation and for the second alleged plot, envisaged Castro being killed.
5

Could there really have been duplicity on such a breathtaking scale? Did the Kennedys open a peace parley with Castro while simultaneously pressing ahead with murderous schemes to get rid of him? In a 1994 interview, former Kennedy Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the author that he had learned of the coup planning—after the assassination—from the committee in the National Security Council that was working on it.” That is, from the Special Group, effectively directed by Robert Kennedy. “There’s no particular contradiction there,” Rusk said. “It was just an either/or situation. That went on frequently.” The Kennedy brothers, he said, had been “playing with fire.”

If Castro discovered he was being two-timed—and that seems overwhelmingly likely, given that Cubela seems to have remained loyal—how would he respond? And what if one of the more virulent anti-Castro exile factions (and perhaps some of their CIA backers) learned of—and believed to be real and ongoing—the peace feelers between Kennedy and Castro? How would
they
react? When briefed by Attwood on the status of the dialogue with the Cubans, Robert Kennedy had voiced concern about security. It was, he feared, “bound to leak.”

The risk was surely greater than the Kennedys knew, and increasing with every week that passed. The CIA had known for months about Lisa Howard and her information on Castro’s comments about a possible rapprochement—she had talked with Agency officials following her return from
Cuba. Yet it was Howard whom Attwood used when in late October, wishing to maintain momentum, he sought to get a message through to Castro. From her New York City apartment, Howard made a string of calls to Castro’s aide Vallejo in Cuba. Then Attwood himself tried calling from Howard’s phone. Getting through meant hours of loose talk on vulnerable open lines.

This was a naïve way of going about a mission that was supposed to be secret. The CIA had long since succeeded in placing agents hostile to Cuba inside the Cuban mission to the United Nations headed by Carlos Lechuga, who of course knew about Attwood’s work. Making overseas calls in those days, moreover, involved going through an operator—an insecure procedure. The National Security Agency intercepted calls to Havana, and other U.S. intelligence agencies reaped the informational harvest.
6

“I think the CIA must have known about this initiative,” Arthur Schlesinger, former Kennedy Special Assistant and the presidency’s preeminent chronicler, told the author. “They must certainly have realized that Bill Attwood and the Cuban representative to the U.N. were doing more than exchanging daiquiri recipes… . They had all the wires tapped at the Cuban delegation to the United Nations.” On at least one of Lisa Howard’s calls to Havana, Attwood was to recall, she said the President was personally committed to the ongoing contacts.

“If the CIA did find out what we were doing,” Attwood said he realized later, that could have “trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles, and the more gung-ho CIA people who had been involved since the Bay of Pigs. If word of a possible normalization of relations with Cuba leaked to these people, I can understand why they would have reacted so violently. This was the end of their dreams of
returning to Cuba, and they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the President.”

Arthur Schlesinger agreed. “Undoubtedly, if word leaked of President Kennedy’s efforts,” he said, “that might have been exactly the kind of thing to trigger some explosion of fanatical violence. It seems to me a possibility not to be excluded.”

Far away from New York City and Washington, DC, the prelude to tragedy had been unfolding. As Attwood made his not-so-secret contacts with Cuba, Lee Oswald—and at some stage apparently an Oswald imposter—had badgered Cuban and Soviet diplomats in Mexico City to grant him visas. There, too, CIA recording devices recorded the action. At about the same time in Dallas—perhaps on October 3—Silvia Odio had been visited by two anti-Castro operatives accompanied by the quiet American they called “Leon Oswald.” The “Oswald” who—the operatives’ leader would tell her in that odd phone call, just days after the first public reporting of a coming presidential visit to Dallas—apparently said the exiles “should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs.”

On October 1, at a house in the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch, the local John Birch Society hosted three venomously anti-Kennedy exiles. A member of the audience taped what was said and later provided the recording to a senior Dallas police officer, who years later provided a copy to the author. On the tape, a Bay of Pigs veteran named Nestor Castellanos can be heard reviling the President: “Get him out! Get him out! The quicker, the sooner, the better. He’s
doing all kinds of deals
[author’s emphasis]… . Mr. Kennedy is kissing Mr.
Khrushchev. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had kissed Castro, too.”

After referring to plans for an anti-Kennedy demonstration, Castellanos tells his audience, “We are waiting for Kennedy the twenty-second [November], buddy. We are going to see him, in one way or the other. We’re going to give him the works when he gets in Dallas.” While no evidence links this speaker to the coming assassination, his speech reflects the passionate antipathy to the President among anti-Castro activists.

Before Dallas, the President was to visit Chicago—on November 2—and Miami—on November 18. In Chicago, three days before Kennedy arrived, the Secret Service learned of a potential threat to his life. Police arrested a former marine with a history of mental illness named Thomas Vallee, who was found to be in possession of an M-1 rifle and three thousand rounds of ammunition. Vallee, a member of the John Birch Society, was an outspoken opponent of the Kennedy administration. According to a former Secret Service agent there was also another threat in Chicago, involving a four-man team armed with high-power rifles. One member of the team, the agent said, was a Hispanic.
7

The visit to Chicago was canceled at the last minute, when crowds were already massing to greet the President. It is not clear whether the reason for the cancellation was a crisis following the assassination of President Diem in Vietnam, or because the President was feeling unwell—or in light of a murder threat.

On November 6 in Dallas, Oswald left his note at the office of the FBI, the note Bureau officials would destroy after the assassination.
8
On November 9, in Miami, the head of police intelligence sat listening to a fuzzy tape-recording of a conversation between a known right-wing extremist, Joseph
Milteer, and a trusted police informant. The transcript, made later that day, ran as follows:

Informant: I think Kennedy is coming here on the eighteenth, or something like that to make some kind of speech… .

Milteer: You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans. There are so many of them here.

Informant: Yeah. Well, he will have about a thousand bodyguards, don’t worry about that.

Milteer: The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.

Informant: Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?

Milteer: From an office building with a high-powered rifle He knows he’s a marked man… .

Informant: They are really going to try to kill him?