II. THE ASSASSINS
Rolando Cubela Secades was born in Havana in 1933. After completing medical school in 1956, he joined Castro’s mountain guerrillas in fighting Batista’s army and became an early comrade-in-arms of Castro. He proved his mettle on October 27, 1956, by assassinating Antonio Blanco Rico, the head of Batista’s secret police, and in March 1957, he took part in a bloody assault on the presidential palace in which five of Batista’s guards were killed. Castro made him head of the Student Directorate, which took control of the presidential palace after Batista fled on New Year’s Eve, 1958. Cubela, given the rank of major in Castro’s new Cuban army, was put in command of Castro’s youth organizations. In 1961, as head of the Cuban chapter of the International Federation of Students, he was able to carry out sensitive missions abroad for Castro. His close proximity to Castro led him into an intelligence game with the CIA in the early 1960s. As early as March 1961, he sent word to the CIA through another agent claiming that he wanted to defect, but the CIA took no action. Then, on July 30, 1962, while attending an international conference on youth in Helsinki, he met with a CIA officer and offered his services. The offer of a close friend of Castro’s to secretly serve America was not one that the CIA could refuse. As the CIA inspector general’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Castro later recounted in detail, Cubela, under the code name AMLASH, said he would “execute” Carlos Rodriguez, one of Castro’s key operatives, and also blow up the Soviet Embassy for the CIA. So at a time when the CIA was searching for an inside man in Havana, Cubela was volunteering to work for it as an assassin and bomber. The CIA declined to take him up on his offer.
A year later, in September 1963, Cubela received word that the CIA again wanted to see him in Brazil. So began his extraordinary mission.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born on October 18, 1939, at the Old French Hospital in New Orleans. His father, Robert E. Lee Oswald, an insurance-premium collector named after the Civil War general, had died of a heart attack two months before. Since he had problems at school, on October 24, 1956, having just turned seventeen, he joined the U.S. Marines. In October 1960, after receiving a hardship discharge from the Marines, he defected to the Soviet Union. He spent nearly eighteen months in Moscow and Minsk, and he married a Russian woman, Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova. He then returned to the United States in June 1962 with Marina and moved to Dallas. Ten months later, he attempted his first assassination. His target was General Edwin A. Walker, who had been forced to resign from the Army because of his open support for right-wing extremist causes. Walker had also called for an American invasion of Castro’s Cuba. Walker lived in the upscale Turtle Creek section of Dallas. On March 10, 1963, Oswald used his Imperial Reflex camera to photograph the alley behind Walker’s house. According to Marina’s later testimony, he put the photographs and other information into a journal that he kept in his study. He then ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a telescopic sight from Klein’s Sporting Goods Store in Chicago, using the alias “A. Hidell.” On April 10, 1963, Oswald left a note for his wife instructing her to go to the Soviet embassy if he was killed or captured by the police. He then, according to Marina’s testimony, went to General Walker’s house, fired at him, and returned home at 11:30 p.m. The shot missed only by inches, but, with police investigating the assassination attempt in Dallas, Oswald fled to New Orleans.
III. APPOINTMENTS
Porto Alegre, Brazil. September 5–8, 1963.
Nestor Sanchez, a Spanish-speaking CIA case officer, flew to Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the first week of September 1963. He had been dispatched there by SAS chief Desmond FitzGerald to offer Cubela a highly sensitive assignment. The Brazil meeting had been prearranged through a third party in Havana. Cubela would be in Porto Alegre from September 5 to 8, representing Castro at the Pan American Games. At the meeting, Cubela discussed possible ways for the CIA to approach Cuban military officers. He then suggested almost precisely what the CIA had been under pressure to accomplish: the elimination of Castro himself, a prerequisite to regime change. As a candidate for the mission, Cubela seemed almost too perfect: a trusted colleague of Castro, with direct access to him, who had carried out a prior assassination. Sanchez now asked the key question: Would Cubela be willing to carry out an elimination mission for the CIA? Cubela responded that he would consider such a mission if he knew it had been properly authorized by President Kennedy.
The next day, Sanchez returned to Washington to speak to his superiors. Cubela returned to Havana.
Havana, Cuba. September 7, 1963.
When the CIA made its approach to Cubela, it was unaware that Cubela had an undisclosed motive for meeting Sanchez. He was what is called in the intelligence game a “dangle,” or double agent. In this wilderness of mirrors, Cubela was dispatched by Castro’s intelligence service, the DGI, to make contact with the CIA, feign disloyalty to Castro, and report back on what he gleaned from his meetings. It was not until 1992, nearly thirty years later, that the CIA learned from a defector the truth about Cubela. The defector, Miguel Mir, had served in Castro’s security office in Havana prior to his defection to the United States, and he reviewed Cubela’s intelligence file, which showed Cubela was working as a double agent under the control of Cuban intelligence when he met with the CIA in Brazil. His mission was to report back to Havana on the CIA’s offer to him. If so, Castro would have learned by or before September 7, 1963, that the CIA had attempted to recruit an assassin.
That very day, September 7, Castro went to the only piece of Brazilian territory in Havana, the Brazilian embassy. It was holding a reception attended by the international press. When he arrived, Castro sought out Daniel Harker, the U.S. correspondent for the Associated Press, and gave him an extraordinary scoop in an on-the-record interview. He warned U.S. leaders against “aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders,” adding that, if they did so, “they themselves will not be safe.” It implied an ominous threat. Harker’s story was sent out by the AP and made headlines in newspapers around the world.
Washington, D.C. September 8–12, 1963.
Castro’s message unsettled the CIA. Ray Rocca, the chief of research on the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, immediately brought it to the attention of his boss, James Jesus Angleton. Angleton, as he later told me, did not believe that it was a coincidence that less than twenty-four hours after the CIA had approached a possible candidate to eliminate Castro in Brazil, Castro had taunted the U.S. at the Brazilian embassy about such plots. Angleton took it as evidence that Castro knew of the plot that the CIA had hatched in Brazil. According to Angleton, by continuing the attempt to recruit Cubela, the CIA could give Castro evidence of the involvement of the highest echelon of American government in the assassination plot. He sent a memo to FitzGerald saying that he considered the operation “insecure.”
The threat of reprisals against American leaders had to be considered and evaluated by the Kennedy Administration. The CIA’s covert activities against Cuba, under the direct supervision of a special group in the National Security Council that was augmented by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor, designated a special committee composed of FitzGerald and a representative of both the Attorney General and the Secretary of State to weigh the risks involved in proceeding with covert actions against Cuba.
The committee met at 2:30 p.m. at the Department of State on September 12 for a “brainstorming” session, as it was described in the memorandum of the meeting, which concluded that although “there was a strong likelihood that Castro would retaliate in some way,” it would probably be at “a low level.” The specific possibility of “attacks against U.S. officials” was assumed to be “unlikely.” Shortly after this review, FitzGerald, disregarding Angleton’s warning, ordered Sanchez to continue with the efforts to recruit Cubela.
New Orleans. September 9, 1963.
On September 9, 1963, Castro’s message reverberated in New Orleans. The AP story by Harker was splashed across three columns in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune, the local newspaper read by Lee Harvey Oswald. Castro’s warning presumably would have been of great interest to Oswald. According to Marina, Castro was his hero. Oswald had also opened a branch office of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an organization dedicated to opposing U.S. policy toward Cuba. He had gone on local talk radio and handed out leaflets on the street to show his support for Castro, and these pro-Castro activities had brought him to the attention of the local police, which arrested him briefly, and even called the FBI. At one point that summer, Oswald considered hijacking an airliner and forcing it at gunpoint to fly to Havana, as his wife later divulged. Not only did Castro now raise in the press the specter of American assassination plots directed against him, but he suggested that Cuba might need to retaliate. Oswald, who, according to Marina, spent hours practicing with his rifle in the backyard, now swung into action.
He made arrangements for Marina and his daughter to return to Dallas, and for a tourist card to go to Mexico City, which was the nearest city with a Cuban embassy.
Paris, France. September 14, 1963.
On September 14, 1963, Cubela arrived in Paris. He was there ostensibly to study French at the Alliance Française. At least, that is what he told the CIA. But, as he was acting under the control of the Cuban DGI, his likely purpose was to continue his “dangle” operation in a city in which the Cubans had an embassy and could conduct counter-surveillance. The CIA accommodated Cubela by arranging a safe house for his meetings with the CIA.
Dallas, Texas. September 25, 1963.
On the night of September 25, in Dallas, Oswald and two dark-skinned men came to the home of Sylvia Odio, a young Cuban refugee. Her father had been involved in a plot to kill Castro the year before—a plot in which Cubela had also been involved. Unlike Cubela, however, her father had been captured in Cuba and was still imprisoned there. The visitors related to her “details about where they saw her father and what activities he was in,” as she later told the Warren Commission investigators. Oswald, who was introduced as “Leon Oswald,” was described to her in Spanish by one of the men as an ex-Marine and expert shot. Odio abruptly ended the conversation when they started discussing the Cuban underground because, as she later told me, she became “highly suspicious” of them. The next day, she received a call from them saying that they were on their way to Mexico.
Later that same day, Oswald crossed the border into Mexico at Nuevo Laredo, Texas, on a Continental Trailways bus.
Mexico City, Mexico. September 27, 1963.
On September 27, at 10:00 a.m. Oswald arrived by bus in Mexico City. He registered at the Hotel Comercio under the alias O. H. Lee. To get to Cuba, he believed that he also would need a visa from the Soviet Union—then Cuba’s closest ally—so he first visited the Soviet embassy, which was only a block away from the Cuban embassy compound. He then walked to the Cuban Embassy, where he was interviewed by Silvia Tirado de Duran, who had been hired there months earlier to be part of the consular section. Oswald told her that he was “a friend of the Cuban revolution” and presented the documentary evidence of his pro-Castro activities in New Orleans.
Silvia Duran strongly supported Castro, although she was a Mexican citizen, and wrote on his visa application: “The applicant states that he is a member of the American Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He displayed documents in proof of his membership in the two aforementioned organizations.” Meanwhile, Oswald, after again going to the Soviet embassy, returned in the afternoon to the Cuban embassy and asked to see a higher-ranking Cuban official, Eusebio Azque. According to witnesses, they engaged in a heated exchange about what Oswald could do to help Cuba. Oswald returned the next day, even though it was Saturday and the embassy was officially closed, and a number of other times in the next three days. He also met Silvia Duran and possibly other embassy employees outside the embassy—and beyond the range of the CIA’s surveillance of it. Pedro Gutierrez, a credit investigator for a Mexican department store, later stated that he saw Oswald leaving the Cuban embassy that same Tuesday in the company of a tall Cuban, and that both got into a car. Early the next morning, Oswald checked out of the hotel and boarded the 8:30 a.m. Transporte del Norte bus headed for Texas.
Paris, France. October 3–13, 1963.
Nestor Sanchez arrived in Paris on October 3, 1963. Accompanied by two other CIA officers, he immediately went to the safe house to complete the recruitment of AMLASH. The mission now had been fully approved by CIA headquarters at Langley.
Cubela, however, had a surprise for the CIA. Before he would go ahead with the plan to eliminate Castro (which he had himself proposed in Brazil), he wanted some sort of personal assurance or “signal” from Attorney General Kennedy that the Kennedy Administration would actively support him in this endeavor. On October 11, Sanchez cabled his superiors at CIA headquarters that “Cubela was insistent upon meeting with a senior U.S. official, preferably Robert F. Kennedy, for assurances of U.S. moral support for any activity Cubela undertook in Cuba.” He further suggested that the “highest and profound consideration be given” to Cubela’s request. The assessment of those in contact with Cubela “is that he is determined to attempt op[eration] against Castro with or without U.S. support.” Sanchez received a cable in reply that ordered him to return to the United States via London “before entering final round discussions with AMLASH.”
Dallas, Texas. October 17, 1963.
After Mexico, Oswald moved to a rooming house on North Beckley Street in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas under the alias “O. H. Lee.” He had moved his wife Marina and young daughter June to the home of a friend, Ruth Paine, in Irving, Texas. He had also stowed his rifle there in the Paine garage. Acting as if he were on a secret mission, he forbade his wife to tell anyone where he was living or working. On October 17, he had gotten a job paying a $1.25 an hour filling orders for textbooks at the Texas School Book Depository. The building, in downtown Dallas, overlooked at least one of the possible routes that a presidential motorcade would likely take en route to the airport.
Washington, D.C. Mid-October 1963.
Overruling objections by his own unit’s counterintelligence officer, FitzGerald decided to meet with Cubela himself as a “personal representative” of the president’s brother. The risk of possibly compromising the president was apparently outweighed in his opinion by the gains in advancing the Kennedy Administration’s goal of a coup d’état in Cuba. The contact plan for the meeting stated: “FitzGerald will represent himself as personal representative of Robert F. Kennedy who traveled to [Paris] for specific purpose of meeting AMLASH and giving him assurances of full support with the change of the present government.”
Meanwhile, the CIA counterintelligence staff notified the FBI, the Department of State, and Naval intelligence of Oswald’s contact with the Cuban and Soviet embassies. Since the CIA was then restricted from investigating U.S. citizens in the absence of a “special request,” it “did nothing further on the case,” according to its own files on Oswald, except to request on October 23 a photograph of Oswald from the Navy to check against its files.
Havana, Cuba. Mid-October, 1963.
On October 15, 1963, Oswald’s visa was processed in Havana. Castro would later claim that Oswald had acted crazily in his visits to the embassy, talking wildly about taking action to “free Cuba from American imperialism.” But that assessment did not prevent the Cuban Foreign Ministry from approving his application. Three days later the Ministry notified the Cuban embassy in Mexico that it could issue Oswald his Cuban visa, provided that he showed proof that he had obtained a Soviet entry visa. If Oswald had still been in contact with Duran or other Cuban Embassy employees, he would have learned that he had been provided with a way of getting to Cuba.
Paris, France. October 29, 1963.
FitzGerald met with Cubela at the safe house—this time a hotel suite—on October 29, 1963, using the alias “James Clark.”
Cubela said he wanted confirmatio
n from a senior U.S. official, not a member of the CIA. FitzGerald assured Cubela that once the coup had succeeded and Castro had been removed from power, the Kennedy Administration would be fully prepared to aid and support the new government. Cubela asked for the delivery of a specific weapon—a rifle with telescopic sights capable of killing Castro from a distance.
Although FitzGerald did not use his real name, he was a well-known figure in Washington, and, if Cubela were debriefed on this meeting, FitzGerald would have been readily identifiable to Cuban intelligence from Cubela’s description. Castro would then have further proof that the plotters in Paris were no rogue group in the CIA.
New York City. November 14, 1963.
The CIA was informed by one of its agents that Cubela was not at all happy that he was denied by the CIA “certain small pieces of equipment which promised a final solution to the problem.” Presumably, this referred to the high-powered rifle with telescopic sight that he had specifically requested from the man representing himself as Kennedy’s personal emissary.
Miami. November 18, 1963.
FitzGerald arranged a further “signal” for Cubela. He wrote a section of the speech that President Kennedy was to deliver in Miami on November 18. It described the Castro government as a “small band of conspirators” that, “once removed,” would ensure United States assistance to the Cuban nation.
The Annals of Unsolved Crime Page 27
