Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Wondered: Talbot, op. cit., p. 7–.

  Wofford: Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980, p. 415.

  “National security”: int. Attwood by Mark Redhead, 1986.

  22. Casting the First Stone

  379 Shakespeare quote: The Rape of Lucrece, II.939–940.

  Johnson summons Warren: Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren, New York: Doubleday, 1977, Chapter 11; Warren Commission memo by Melvin Eisenberg, February 17, 1964; Manchester, op. cit., p. 730–, citing Warren int.

  “a little incident”: LBJ phone call, November 29, 1963, transcript at www.history-matters.com.

  380 Blakey: conv. 1980 & corr. February 2013.

  Hosty: James Hosty with Thomas Hosty, Assigment Oswald, New York: Arcade, 1996, p. 219.

  DEFCON 4/3: Memo for Bromley Smith, December 4, 1963, NARA 202-10002-10180.

  Cuba’s position: statement by Carlos Lechuga, Four Days, Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy, Rockville, MD: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1964, p. 115.

  381 Daniel: New Republic, December 7, 1963.

  Note 1: Castro was Prime Minister in 1963. He did not become President until 1976.

  382 U.S. reaction: (editorials) Dallas Morning News, November 26, 1963; (poll) Dallas Morning News, December 6, 1963.

  Alexander: Manchester, op. cit., p. 326 & see Henry Wade testimony, June 8, 1964, V.213–. The Johnson aide who called Wade was Cliff Carter.

  Warren and “Castro plot” in 1967: Sen. Int. Cttee., Performance of Intelligence Agencies, p. 80.

  383 Smith: New York Times, June 25, 1976.

  Note 2: Johnson had not been formally off the record during the interview with Cronkite, but insisted later that for “national security” reasons the exchange about the assassination should not be broadcast. It was transmitted only after his death. (Walter Cronkite int. of Johnson, September 1969, Lyndon Johnson Library, “The Assassination Tapes,” relevant part viewable at www.youtube.com, & Atlantic Monthly, June 2004)

  Janos: Atlantic Monthly, July 1973.

  Marianne Means: Sarasota Herald-Tribune, April 25, 1975.

  Note 3: Johnson also referred to his doubts about the assassination to his aide Marvin Watson—saying he felt “the CIA had something to do with this plot”—in 1967. He mentioned his suspicions of Castro to Joseph Califano and Jack Valenti, other White House aides. (Watson: Powers, op. cit., p. 121; DeLoach to Tolson, April 4, 1967, FBI 44-24696; Califano/Valenti: Jeff Sheshol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and the Feud That Defined a Decade, New York: Norton, 1997, p. 131–).

  Drew Pearson account/Morgan: “The Assassination Tapes,” article by Max Holland, Atlantic Monthly, June 2004.

  384 HSCA on Roselli claims: HSCA Report, p. 114.

  feedback: Sen. Int. Cttee., Performance of Intelligence Agencies, p. 84.

  Note 4: Lyndon Johnson’s biographer Robert Caro quoted the former President’s friend Joe Kilgore as saying he “could believe what he wanted to believe … could convince himself of anything, even something that wasn’t true.” Others shared this impression. The weakness of the “Castro-did-it” claim, as relayed to him in 1967, was apparent to Johnson himself. He said on a White House recording of a March 2, 1967 phone call, “If you go looking at it [hard], as Abe [his friend Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas] said, who is it that’s seen Castro? Or heard from Castro? Or knows Castro … that’s [in a position to] … [who] could be confirming all this? [Fortas said] that we just hear that this is what he did, but nobody points to how we hear it.” (Caro: Robert Caro, Means of Ascent, New York: Vintage, 1991, p. 52–; (March 2, 1967 call: Max Holland, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 408 & see p. 396. Holland’s book is masterful on this episode.)

  Note 5: There is some small room for doubt as to how that remark, ominous on its face, got into the AP report. While the epithets against Kennedy appeared in the report of the same conversation by AP’s rival UPI, the sentence that seemed to threaten the U.S. leadership did not. Available documentation does not clearly indicate whether both the AP’s Harker and the UPI correspondent were present when Castro was speaking, or whether the UPI story was merely a pick-up from the AP story.

  Fabián Escalante, a former Cuban intelligence chief who met with researchers, including this author, in 1996, did not deny the essence of the remark but said it had been distorted. He told the author that AP reporter Harker had been “reported” during an earlier stint in Havana for using his journalistic privileges “to send information unrelated to his work as a reporter.” That should be taken with a sizable pinch of salt—few honest reporters long avoid the wrath of regimes whose own press is fettered. All the same, and given later revelations about the CIA’s use of journalists, the Harker report—in light of its impact—deserved more investigation than it received. (AP/UPI stories: cited in CD 1135,11–, Memo for the record, November 8, 1976, CIA doc. 80T01357A; Review of Selected Items in the LHO File, April 15, 1975, NARA 104-10322-10001; distorted: Fabián Escalante, JFK: The Cuba Files, Melbourne, Australia, Ocean, Dick Russell in High Times, March 1996; “information unrelated”: int. Fabian Escalante, Bahamas, 1996, High Times, March 1996).

  Widely interpreted: e.g. CIA memo to David Belin, director of Rockefeller Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, May 30, 1975.

  Castro to HSCA: HSCA Report, p. 126–; HSCA III.216, 220 & see HSCA X.181–.

  386 “Threat” remark in New Orleans: Russo, Brothers in Arms, New York: Bloomsbury, 2008, pp. 295, 502, citing New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 9, 1963.

  Oswald on JFK: (under questioning) Report, p. 609; (radio debate) XXI.641; (Martello) X.60.

  387 “persuasive”: HSCA Report, p. 129.

  Note 6: The timing of Alvarado’s visit to the Embassy is important. Whether he made up the story himself or did so at the suggestion of others, he came up with it very rapidly once the fact of an Oswald visit to Mexico had become public knowledge. Although the story was slow in making news in the United States, it was in the Mexican newspaper Excelsior on the evening of November 24. At noon the following day, Alvarado was telling his story about Oswald at the U.S. Embassy. Until the appearance of the Excelsior story, the Oswald visit to Mexico was theoretically known only to Oswald’s wife, Soviet and Cuban Consulate staff, and U.S. and Mexican intelligence. The “high source” Excelsior quoted as the origin of its story was probably Mexican—Mexican agents worked closely with the CIA on the Embassy surveillance.

  Alvarado episode: Sen. Int. Cttee., Performance of Intelligence Agencies, pp. 28–, 41–; Report, p. 308–; XXV.647; int. Thomas Mann, 1978, ints. former staff at U.S. Embassy in Mexico; Phillips, op. cit., p. 141–; (Mann background) Schlesinger, Robert F. Kennedy, op. cit., pp. 630–636; (Mann on Oswald’s motivation, etc.) Mann cable to Secretary of State Rusk, November 28, 1963. Also see refs. in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; ints. Laurence Keenan, 1993.

  390 Nicaraguan agent: CIA memo to White House, FBI, State Department, November 26, 1963, DIR 85089.

  Nicaragua: Prouty, op. cit., pp. 29, 41–, 388–.

  Artime: “The Curious Intrigues of Cuban Miami” by Horace Sutton, Saturday Review/World, September 11, 1973; “Cuba on Our Mind” by Tad Szulc, Esquire, February 1974; article by Szulc, New York Times, June 9, 1973; (camps) HSCA X.67 & see Scott, op. cit., p. 91, et al.; (first) Hunt, op. cit., p. 38.

  391Note 7: See Chapter 18.

  Note 8: The Warren Commission noted what one member, Gerald Ford, would call “the strong personal feelings of the then U.S. Ambassador to Mexico … that Castro was somehow involved in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy.” (HSCA II.569)

  Note 9: The ancient Alvarado story was resurrected most recently in
a much-trumpeted 2006 German television documentary, the thrust of which was that Castro had President Kennedy killed. The film relied on a supposed agent of today’s Russian intelligence service who claimed to have found an old KGB document—dating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union—that had suggested the Cubans might have some use for defector Oswald. The film used interviews with four supposed former Castro agents to support its thesis. A document provided by a former aide to both Kennedy and Johnson, Marty Underwood, described a purported November 22 visit to Dallas by a Cuban intelligence officer. The alleged KGB document was not produced. Underwood, for his part, would acknowledge that he had written his document as late as the 1990s. The key Cuban sources appeared in the program under pseudonyms or with their faces obscured. This author, who conducted a long interview with the film’s director, Wilfried Huissman, found the documentary less than credible.

  A key contributor to the Huissman documentary was Gus Russo, a journalist who has worked on the Kennedy case for many years and authored two books on the subject. In the first, Live by the Sword, Russo concluded that Oswald “did it for Cuba,” and that leads that indicated “ a possible Cuban conspiracy with Oswald” were never fully followed up at the time. The author has not had the opportunity to study the second book, Brothers in Arms, but it appears to credit some of the questionable elements used in the Huissman film.(“Rendezvous with Death,” Westdeutscher Rundfunk, January 2007, int. Wilfried Huissman, convs. Gus Russo; Underwood: AARB Report, p. 136; see also analysis in Bugliosi, op. cit., Endnotes, p. 731; Russo: Gus Russo, Live by the Sword, Baltimore, MD: Bancroft Press, 1998—findings at p. 459 & Gus Russo & Stephen Molton, Brothers in Arms, New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).

  Gutierrez: CD 564; Warren Commission staff memo by Coleman/Slawson, April 1, 1964; CD 566.3–; CD 663.4; CD 896.3; CD 1029; CIA documents 965–927 AK; 972–927 AR; 1179–1995.

  Air Cubana: Sen. Int. Cttee., Performance of Intelligence Agencies, p. 30; HSCA Report, p. 117.

  Note 10: Also in December, another CIA source caused a flap about the supposedly “suspicious” travels of a Cuban named Gilberto Policarpo Lopez. Lopez crossed the Texas border to Mexico the day after the assassination and flew to Havana four days later, reportedly the only person on board the flight. This story was provocative because—like Oswald—Lopez was affiliated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and made a stop at the Cuban Embassy before leaving. The Assassinations Committee found that he had plausible personal reasons for returning to Cuba. (HSCA Report, p. 118)

  Díaz/Borrell: FBI memos—Director to Legat, Mexico, January 9, 1964, and Miami to Director, February 29, 1964, FBI file no. 105-82555; CIA memo, Curtis as originator, January 14, 1964; ints. Borrell, Señora Díaz Versón & daughter Silvia, 1993.

  392 Luce: ints. Clare Boothe Luce, 1978; HSCA X.83; and int. by Earl Golz of Dallas Morning News, 1979; Washington Star, November 16, 1975; ibid, January 25, 1976.

  393Note 11: Texas Governor John Connally, who was wounded on November 22, had been Secretary of the Navy in 1961. Oswald wrote to the Secretary, asking for a reversal of the record of his undesirable discharge from the Marine Corps, when the Secretary in office was Fred Korth. As an attorney, oddly, Korth had represented the husband of Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, during divorce proceedings. (XIX, Fulsom Exhibit 1, p. 61–; Oswald 201 File, Vol. 3, Attachments 1, 7, 2, Pt. 2, p. 92; & Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 80 www.maryferrell.org)

  Note 12: Contacted by Committee investigators, Bringuier and other DRE veterans all denied having made the 1963 call to Mrs. Luce.

  Note 13: In a major article on CIA manipulation of the media, Carl Bernstein reported, there was close liaison between the Agency and Time-Life, of which Mrs. Luce’s husband, Henry, was publisher. In 1962, Mrs. Luce had authored a Life magazine story about her exile fighter protégés. (Bernstein: Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977; story: HSCA X.83)

  Note 14: In this mosaic of apparent disinformation, a false trail about Oswald may also have been laid in Miami, the main base of CIA-backed anti-Castro activists. Before the assassination, according to a witness, one Jorge Martínez had talked about an American acquaintance named Lee who spoke Russian, was as usual a brilliant marksman and talked of President Kennedy and “shooting between the eyes.” Martínez was eventually identified as an exile brought to the United States by Mike McLaney, one of the old Havana casino bosses. McLaney and his brother William appeared earlier in this book. (See Chapter 18.)

  On November 26, while Alvarado the Nicaraguan was spinning his fable in Mexico, Florida’s Pompano Sun-Sentinel ran an allegation that Oswald had previously been in Miami, had contacted “supporters of Fidel Castro,” tried to infiltrate an anti-Castro group, passed out Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets, and gotten into a fight with anti-Castro militants—just as in New Orleans. Oswald had also supposedly had “telephone conversations with the Cuban government G-2 Intelligence Service.” The Sun-Sentinel article named Frank Sturgis, the future Watergate burglar, as being a member of the Florida anti-Castro group Oswald had supposedly tried to infiltrate. Sturgis had once been an overseer at Havana’s Tropicana casino, managed at the time by Lewis McWillie, a close friend of Oswald’s executioner, Jack Ruby.

  The FBI found no evidence that Oswald had ever been in Florida. Other fabrications purporting to link Oswald to Castro’s Cuba were also blatantly false. The Secret Service intercepted a letter to Oswald mailed from Havana on November 28, 1963 and signed by one “Pedro Charles.” “Charles” indicated in the letter that Oswald had been hired by him to carry out a mission involving “accurate shooting.” Meanwhile, a letter sent to Robert Kennedy appeared to corroborate the supposed Oswald-Charles plot. “Charles” was identified as a Castro agent. Examination quickly established that the letters were mischievous—they had been written on the same typewriter. (Martínez: CD 829; CD 246; Pompano story/Sturgis: Sun Sentinel, November 26 & December 4, 1963; CD 59; CD 395; CD 1020; CD 810; L. Patrick Gray to H. R. Haldeman, June 19, 1972 [Gray hearings, p. 47]; “Charles”: XXVI.148; other letters: HSCA III.401–).

  394Note 15: See Chapter 19.

  Mirabal: HSCA III.177.

  Rodríguez: Dallas Morning News, September 24, 1975, reprinted from Los Angeles Times.

  Note 16: This individual may perhaps have been Ernesto Rodríguez Cue, who in 1962 was a Cuban Embassy employee in Mexico City. He was not, apparently, one and the same as the Ernesto Rodríguez, an anti-Castro militant who operated a language school in New Orleans, mentioned in Chapter 17. (Cue: Foreign Political Matters—Cuba, memo of May 28, 1962, CIA file 80T01357A).

  395Note 17: Veciana’s claim to have seen Oswald with “Bishop” was described earlier, in Chapter 18.

  Ruiz: HSCA X.41; ints. Ruiz.

  Note 18: The Assassinations Committee talked to Veciana’s cousin Ruiz in Cuba, who suggested Veciana had had psychiatric problems and referred the Committee to another Veciana relative, a doctor, who—Ruiz said—would attest to Veciana’s psychiatric trouble. The Committee found to the contrary that the doctor attested to Veciana’s “sound mental condition.” He knew, in addition, that Veciana had had to undergo vigorous tests for his work in the banking business. Another family member confirmed Veciana’s mental health, and there was no evidence of any disorder of the sort implied by Ruiz. Veciana alleged that Ruiz was once approached for recruitment by the CIA, and his slandering of Veciana may have been an overkill reaction to that. (HSCA X.45)

  “honesty”/ “straightest”: HSCA X.42.

  Note 19: In Spanish, MRP stands for Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo. (HSCA X.137)

  396Note 20: Allegations directly incriminating Castro aside, alternative versions have suggested the Cuban leader had foreknowledge but did nothing about it. Chronologically, this theme tracks back to information received from a leading member of the U.S. Communist Party, Jack Childs, who for years fed information to the FBI after meetings with Communists abr
oad. Following a May 1964 meeting with Castro in Havana, Childs reported to the FBI that the Cuban leader “stated that when Oswald was refused his visa at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, he acted like a real madman and started yelling and shouting and yelled on his way out, ‘I’m going to kill that bastard. I’m going to kill Kennedy.’ ”

  The alleged outburst has been used—most recently by Brian Latell in his 2012 book Castro’s Secrets—to suggest that Castro knew in advance what Oswald intended. The FBI summary indicates, rather, that Castro spoke “on the basis of facts given to him by his Embassy personnel who dealt with Oswald and apparently had made a full, detailed report to Castro after President Kennedy was assassinated [author’s emphasis].”

  The Assassinations Committee also considered an allegation that surfaced late in 1964, suggesting Oswald had compromising links with Cuban Embassy staff. Mexican writer Elena Garro claimed that Oswald and two companions had attended a party at the home of a relative of Sylvia Durán, the secretary from the Consulate. Oswald and Durán, Garro said she later learned, were sexually involved with each other. The story emerged through a CIA informant named June Cobb. Author John Newman, who studied this complex story within the story, surmised that it may have been “invented to falsely implicate the Cuban government in the Kennedy assassination.”

  In his 2012 book, meanwhile, author Brian Latell used the statements of Cuban defectors to suggest Castro had foreknowledge. He cited one, Vladimir Rodríguez Lahera, as being convinced that Castro had lied when he said he knew nothing about Oswald before November 22. The CIA record shows that—under interrogation—Rodriguez in fact said he did not know “whether information on Oswald’s visit to the Cuban Consulate in Mexico … was relayed to any Cuban service.” As mentioned in Chapter 19, the incoming Cuban Consul in Mexico City, Alfredo Mirabal—who was also an intelligence officer—acknowledged that he wrote a “footnote” about the Oswald visit in his routine report to Havana. There is no evidence that this was reported to Castro before the assassination.