The first two articles alluding to the turnaround theory, a syndicated column by Jack Anderson on March 3, 1967, and one by Drew Pearson on March 7, 1967, did not mention Roselli by name and did not attract too much attention. But an article by Anderson and Les Whitten on September 7, 1976, in the Washington Post did attract attention because of the recent Church Committee revelations of the CIA-mob plot to kill Castro and because of the discovery of Roselli’s dismembered body on August 7, just one month before the article was printed. And it did mention Roselli by name, saying that “before he died, Roselli hinted to associates that he knew who had arranged President Kennedy’s murder. It was the same conspirators, he suggested, whom he had recruited earlier to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. By Roselli’s cryptic account, Castro learned the identity of the underworld contacts in Havana who had been trying to knock him off. He [Castro] believed, not altogether without basis, that President Kennedy was behind the plot.” Castro then “enlisted the same underworld elements” to kill Kennedy.5
In addition to the fact that there is no evidence that Castro ever learned the identity of the Cubans supposedly enlisted by the mob between 1961 and 1963 to kill him, Roselli’s turnaround theory is irrational on its face. Even if Castro had decided to kill Kennedy, how could Castro, from his base in Cuba, force hit men for the mob to come back to this country (where he’d immediately lose physical control of them) to kill Kennedy? And even if Castro, an intelligent person by all accounts, had the irrational thought he could do this, he would still have to know that they would never be as dependable to carry out such an assignment as his own agents would be. Needless to say, the HSCA did not find Roselli’s turnaround theory credible.6
Also, there is a predicate for the turnaround theory that has never been proved. There’s no evidence that hit men for the mob were ever captured by Castro. Further, Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratiano, a West Coast organized-crime figure, said that Roselli told him there was no truth to his theory, and Roselli acknowledged in his testimony before the Church Committee on April 23, 1976, that he had “no facts” to support it.7
On July 28, 1976, Roselli disappeared in Miami. On August 7, three fishermen found his butchered body, with his legs sawed off, inside an oil drum on the edge of a sandbar in Dumfoundling Bay, Key Biscayne, Florida. The drum had been weighted down by chains but gases created by the decomposition of Roselli’s body gave the drum enough buoyancy for it to rise to the surface. An unnamed Mafia figure told the New York Times that two men, one an old friend, the other a visitor from Chicago, had lured Roselli aboard a private boat at a nearby marina. Out on the water, while Roselli sipped a vodka, the man from Chicago grabbed him from behind and held his hand tightly over Roselli’s nose and mouth until he was asphyxiated, not a difficult feat since the seventy-year-old Roselli had emphysema.8 Though conspiracy theorists claim he was silenced because of his knowledge of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, there simply is no evidence, anywhere, that he was a part of or had any knowledge of any such conspiracy, and the Justice Department concluded that Roselli’s murder and the murder of Sam Giancana* were unrelated to the CIA-mob plots to kill Castro.9 Such a conclusion makes sense. If Roselli’s or Giancana’s killers were trying to silence them because of their knowledge of the CIA-mob plots to kill Castro, why not also kill Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, to whom both went to actually carry out the job? And why not kill Roselli before he testified before the Church Committee, which he first did on June 24, 1975 (the first of three times, the last time being on April 23, 1976, a little over three months before his murder), at which time he spilled all the beans there were to spill about the CIA-mob plot to kill Castro?
Purported support for the belief that Castro was of a mind to kill Kennedy was an informal discussion Castro had with two American reporters following a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana on the evening of September 7, 1963. Castro spoke, per usual for him, on a wide range of subjects, one of which was Kennedy. The UPI reporter, whose article was published in the New York Times, quoted Castro as saying that “Kennedy is a cretin,” the “Batista of his time and the most opportunistic American president of all time. Kennedy is thinking more about re-election than the American people.”10 The AP reporter, Daniel Harker, took something far more explosive away from the three-hour meeting. He wrote, “Bitterly denouncing what he called recent U.S.-prompted raids on Cuban territory, Castro said: ‘United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.’”11 Did Castro thereby suggest, as Harker says, that if there were such plots, he would retaliate in kind? Even if he did, it would most likely be only loose swagger on his part, in no way negating the fact that there’s no evidence he had Kennedy killed, and that he was well aware that such an act would be the most reckless, unwise, and suicidal action he could ever take. (See later text.)
But I personally doubt that Castro said specifically what Harker quotes him as saying. I learned many years ago the truth of the observation that “quotation marks don’t make a quote,” as most lay people assume they do. I myself have often been quoted incorrectly, several times substantially so. In the first place, if Castro had threatened a retaliatory assassination, it is very hard to believe that the UPI reporter who was present would not have found such a statement sufficiently important to include in his fourteen-paragraph story on the meeting, which he did not do. Just as important was Castro’s response when the HSCA interviewed him in Havana on April 3, 1978. If Castro had been involved in the assassination and had told Harker what Harker quoted him as saying, the likelihood that Castro would have admitted telling Harker anything remotely close to what Harker wrote would obviously have been nil. We could have expected Castro to say that Harker either was a liar or had grossly misquoted him. The fact he said neither at least goes in the direction of his recollection of the incident having credibility. Castro said, “I don’t remember literally what I said, but I remember my intention in saying what I said and it was to…let the United States government know that we knew about the existence of…plots against our lives…I said something like those plots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious one…that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions. That to set those precedents of plotting the assassination of leaders of other countries would be…very negative” (i.e., it could result in one or more of the victim nations retaliating in kind). Castro added that “I didn’t say it as a threat. I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures, similar measures, like a retaliation for that.” Castro said he would say the same thing today as he said back then “because I didn’t mean a threat by that.”12 I, for one, believe Castro.
Another related story that Castro flatly denies, and with good reason, was the one told by British tabloid journalist Comer Clark. In an October 1967 edition of the National Enquirer, he wrote that on July 15, 1967, he had an exclusive interview with Castro late one night in a Havana pizzeria. He quotes Castro as saying, “Lee Oswald came to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City twice. The first time, I was told, he wanted to work for us. He was asked to explain, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go into details. The second time he said something like: ‘Someone ought to shoot that President Kennedy.’ Then Oswald said—and this was exactly how it was reported to me—‘Maybe I’ll try to do it.’ This was less than two months before the U.S. President was assassinated…Yes, I heard of Lee Harvey Oswald’s plan to kill President Kennedy. It’s possible I could have saved him. I might have been able to, but I didn’t. I never believed the plan would be put into effect.”13 The HSCA learned that Clark, who died in 1972, “wrote extensively for the sensationalist press in England. His articles include such items as ‘British Girls as Nazi Sex Slaves’ [and] ‘I Was Hitler’s Secret Love.’”14 When the HSCA asked Castro on April 3, 1978, about Clark’s allegation, he responded in a blizzard of denunciatory words. Among them: “This is absurd. I didn’t say that…It has been invented from t
he beginning until the end…It’s a lie from head to toe. If this man [Oswald] would have done something like that, it would have been our moral duty to inform the United States.” Denying that he had ever met Clark or been interviewed by him, he said, “How could [this man] interview me in a pizzeria? I never go to public restaurants…I would never have given a journalist an interview in a pizzeria…What is the job of that journalist? What is he engaged in?…You should…find [out] who he is and why he wrote it.”15
In yet another example of good investigative journalism on his part, conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers interviewed Clark’s widow and assistant. The widow told Summers that Clark had never mentioned interviewing Castro. Most importantly, Summers writes that the assistant, Nina Gadd, said that “she generated the story, without even going to Havana, on the basis of allegations made to her” by an unnamed Latin American foreign minister.16
As it turns out, though Clark’s story was a fabrication in that he had never spoken to Castro, an earlier source told the FBI essentially the same story. In a June 17, 1964, letter to Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin, J. Edgar Hoover said a “confidential source” who had “furnished reliable information in the past” reported that Castro had “recently said” that “our people in Mexico gave us the details” of Oswald’s visit to the Mexican consulate, and when his request for a visa “was refused him, he headed out saying ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy for this.’”17 The story doesn’t make sense. Why would Oswald threaten to kill Kennedy because the Cuban consulate turned down his request for a visa? What’s the connection? Silvia Duran, the secretary at the consulate who dealt with Oswald and was present at the time of Oswald’s outburst when his request for a visa was denied, said she heard no such threat by Oswald against Kennedy.18 And the Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue, who was also present, also said no such threat by Oswald was made, adding that if it had, he would “have passed this information on to Fidel.”19 It should be noted that the Warren Commission should have included in its report Oswald’s alleged threat to kill Kennedy at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, but it did not, and I have not been able to find Hoover’s letter to Rankin in any of the Commission’s volumes of exhibits.
The story was given a fillip by a secretary at the Cuban consulate whose office was on the second floor, Luisa Calderon Carralero. In a CIA-intercepted telephone call several hours after the assassination, when a male called Calderon at the consulate and asked her if she had heard the news of the president’s death, she replied, in a joking manner, “Yes, of course, I knew it almost before Kennedy…Imagine, one, two, three and now, that makes three [she laughs], what barbarians!”20 The HSCA construed Calderon’s remark, if true, as indicating either “foreknowledge or mere braggadocio. The preponderance of the evidence led the committee to find that it was braggadocio.” When the committee sought to interview Calderon in Cuba, she declined based on illness. However, she did respond to the HSCA’s written interrogatories, denying any foreknowledge of the assassination. Because the HSCA sensed from the demeanor of many other employees at the Cuban consulate that they were telling the truth when they denied having any foreknowledge of the assassination, the committee concluded that Oswald had not “voiced a threat [to kill Kennedy] to Cuban officials.” With respect to the “confidential, reliable source” who said he did, the HSCA said, “However reliable the confidential source may be, the committee found it to be in error in this instance.”21
How did this story, which arguably connected Castro with Kennedy’s assassination, get started? A few days after the assassination (November 26), Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte, a twenty-three-year-old Nicaraguan secret agent purporting to be working against the Cuban Communists for his country’s security service, went to the American embassy in Mexico City and claimed that on September 18, 1963, he was at the Cuban consulate seeking to get to Cuba with the intent to infiltrate Castro’s forces. While standing by the bathroom door, he said he saw three men conversing on an adjacent patio. One was a black man, tall and thin, with reddish hair. The second was a Canadian with blonde hair, and the third man was Lee Harvey Oswald. A tall Cuban joined the group only long enough to pass some currency to the black man. Alvarado said he then overheard the black man say to Oswald, “I want to kill the man,” whereupon Oswald replied, “You’re not man enough, I can do it.” The black man then said, “I can’t go with you, I have a lot to do.” He then gave Oswald $6,500 in large-denomination American bills (he doesn’t say how he knew it was $6,500—did he see and bother to count the denominations adding up to $6,500?), $5,000 as compensation to kill Kennedy and $1,500 as expense money, saying, “This isn’t much.”22 Could anyone with an IQ above 50 possibly believe that this was Oswald’s recruitment into the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and his payment for being the triggerman? Well, Thomas Mann, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico at the time, did believe it. He cabled his superiors at the State Department in Washington that “Castro is the kind of person who would avenge himself in this way. He is the Latin type of extremist who reacts viscerally rather than intellectually.” Mann added that “the unprofessional, almost lackadaisical way in which the money is alleged by Alvarado to have been passed to Oswald fits the way Cubans would be expected to act if the Russians were not guiding them.” Mann requested, in his cable, that the aforementioned Luisa Calderon be arrested because she may have been present when Oswald was given the money.23 Mann didn’t have his fill. Though only the ambassador to Mexico, not a member of U.S. intelligence, he requested through the State Department that the FBI send a knowledgeable agent from Washington down to Mexico City to investigate Alvarado’s claim,24 and he himself wanted to get actively involved in investigating whether Oswald killed Kennedy for Castro. Hoover, who referred to Mann as “one of the pseudo-investigators, a Sherlock Holmes,” was opposed to sending anyone to Mexico City, feeling the FBI agent assigned to the American embassy in Mexico City, Clark Anderson, could do whatever was necessary, and besides, this was a matter for the CIA in Mexico City to handle. Mann was so persistent, however, that Hoover, mostly to pacify Mann, ultimately did send an agent to Mexico City for a few days, but the agent didn’t even get to interrogate Alvarado and was sent home.25
Apart from the fact that Oswald was in New Orleans, not Mexico City, on September 18, 1963 (the day Alvarado said the incident took place), when Mexico police interrogated Alvarado, he admitted, in writing, that he had made up the whole matter. His motive, he said, was that he hated Castro and hoped his story would cause the United States to “take action” against him. When reinterrogated by the CIA, he first claimed the Mexico police had pressured him into retracting his story, and that his retraction, not his first statement, was false. He was then given a polygraph test by a CIA polygraph expert assisted by an FBI agent. The test indicated he was probably lying, prompting Alvarado to say, “I know such machines are accurate, and therefore, I suppose I must be mistaken.”26
On December 1, 1963, less than a week after Alvarado’s claim, another Mexican, Pedro Gutierrez Valencia, a credit investigator for a large Mexico City department store, wrote a letter to President Johnson, making a claim analogous to but not corroborative of Alvarado’s: The date (September 30 or October 1, 1963) was different from Alvarado’s; there were two men, not three; and the location was in front of the Cuban embassy, not on a patio to the rear of the consulate. Gutierrez, leaving the embassy after conducting a credit investigation of one of its employees, claims he heard a heated discussion, in English, between a Cuban and an American in which he could understand only the words “Castro,” “Cuba,” and “Kennedy.” The Cuban counted out American dollars and gave them to the American, at which time they got into the Cuban’s car and drove off. Gutierrez said the American was Oswald.27
Again, the extreme improbability that any agreement and payment for Kennedy’s murder would take place not in private, but literally out in the open in view of others, and under the other circumstances Gutierrez described, is alone enough to discount the story
. But other facts that undermine Gutierrez’s credibility emerged. It turns out that Gutierrez, like Alvarado, was a zealous anti-Castro activist and thus had a motive similar to Alvarado’s for lying: to convince the United States that Castro was behind the assassination, thus inducing this nation to remove Castro from power. But even if Gutierrez did see two men and heard the three words, Gutierrez conceded he saw “Oswald” face-to-face for only a “split second,” at all other times during the incident only seeing the backs of “Oswald” and the other man.28
On June 5, 1978, HSCA staff member Edwin Lopez interviewed Gutierrez on tape, and all Gutierrez would say is that he bumped into Oswald at the Cuban consulate but “I don’t remember him [Oswald] being accompanied by another person.” When Lopez pressed Gutierrez about the fact that he told President Johnson that he saw Oswald with, Lopez incorrectly says, a Cuban-American (Gutierrez had only said the man was Cuban, not Cuban-American), Gutierrez replied, “That is an enigma to me. I do not remember him being accompanied by a Cuban-American.” When Lopez asked Gutierrez about his assertion that the Cuban handed money to Oswald, Gutierrez said, “I do not ever remember that occurring.”29 So much for Pedro Gutierrez.
So there is no credible evidence connecting Castro, by way of the alleged incidents outside the Cuban embassy, with the assassination. It should be added that even if Castro were able to kill Kennedy without being discovered, he was aware, as he said, “that the death of the leader does not change the system. It has never done that.”30 In other words, what reason would Castro have had to believe that the U.S. posture toward him would be better under LBJ? None. He apparently knew very little about LBJ. According to French journalist Jean Daniel, who was with Castro on the day of the assassination, Castro had a series of questions for him after Kennedy’s death was finally confirmed: “What is [Johnson’s] reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?”31
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