Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Kennedy, advised that the invasion had been approved by the previous administration, was faced with a fait accompli. Reluctantly he gave his approval and on Saturday, April 15, 1961, less than three months after Kennedy took office, a force of six B-26 bombers left a secret airfield in Nicaragua for Cuba. It was to have been sixteen, but Kennedy ordered a reduction to “minimum” scale.

  This weekend air strike was a partial success. Castro’s tiny air force was caught on the ground. Only three T-33 jets—considered good only as trainers—along with two B-26 bombers and a few decrepit British Sea Furies escaped the bombing raid. But it was enough.

  On Monday, April 17, the Cuban Brigade landed at Bahia de Cochinos or Bay of Pigs (named after the wild boars that inhabited this desolate area of Cuba) under the code name Zapata. Ironically, Castro knew the area intimately since it was his favorite hunting spot. It was a good location for a landing, with only two main road arteries leading past swamps and dense undergrowth. But this same attribute also made it a formidable trap should Castro’s forces arrive quickly and in force.

  A second air strike had been planned and, by most accounts, would have completed the destruction of Castro’s air force. However, the CIA planners had failed to reckon with John F. Kennedy. Kennedy hesitated, growing more and more concerned that the entire world was realizing that the United States was supporting this invasion of another country. His concern was a far cry from Washington’s policies of today. Today, it is known that failure to order in the second strike actually came from Air Force General Charles Cabell, who as deputy director of the CIA helped organize the invasion. It has been suggested that cancellation of the second air strike actually was part of a plan to discredit Kennedy and force him into more conciliation with the military intelligence communities.

  United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been lied to by the CIA about US involvement, was also discredited after telling the General Assembly that the United States had nothing to do with the invasion.

  Although the Cuban Brigade already was running into trouble on the beaches—one of their ships, the Houston, was set afire by Castro’s planes while an escorting ship, the Barbara, was fired upon by its own side for failing to pick up Houston survivors. Researchers have pondered over the fact that George H. W. Bush, married to a Barbara, has been accused of using his Houston oil firm, Zapata Petroleum Corp., as a front for the anti-Castro Cubans prior to the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In addition, his father, Connecticut senator Prescott Bush, was instrumental in creating the CIA.

  Secretary of state Dean Rusk was concerned that the “international noise level” had risen to an intolerable degree. Rusk argued that no further air strikes be attempted until it could be made to look like the planes came from captured Cuban airfields. Kennedy concurred. Castro’s surviving planes were able to disrupt the landing, allowing his troops to bottle up the beaches. The Bay of Pigs had become a death trap for the Cuban Brigade.

  Kennedy authorized US Navy ships sitting offshore to help evacuate the Brigade, but the Cuban commanders didn’t want evacuation. They wanted the ammunition, naval support, and “umbrella” of air cover that had been promised to them. It never came. As the remnants of the Brigade called for help from the beaches, US military men could only stand silent by their weapons and watch as the gallant Cuban Brigade was torn to bits.

  As news of the debacle spread, everybody concerned was furious.

  Kennedy felt betrayed. He believed he had been led down a primrose path by overly optimistic CIA officials. The CIA planners felt betrayed in that the actual invasion had been scaled down on Kennedy’s orders. The military felt betrayed because they had not been allowed to help plan the invasion. And the Cuban exiles felt betrayed most of all because they had been led to believe they had the full support of the US government. Thanks to gossip from their superiors and CIA advisers, many believed—and still do—that Kennedy was totally responsible for the failure of the invasion.

  In Guatemala City, staging area for the Brigade, the CIA officers were devastated. Many were getting drunk. CIA station chief Robert Davis described them this way: “If someone had gotten close to Kennedy, he’d have killed him. Oh, they hated him!”

  Of the men of the Cuban Brigade, 114 were killed, 1,202 were captured by Castro’s forces, and 150 either never landed or made their way back to safety. The captured Brigade was finally freed on December 23, 1962, after the United States agreed to exchange them for $53 million worth of food and drugs.

  Infuriated by this disastrous defeat, Kennedy nevertheless took the burden of blame. He told reporters, “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. What mattered was only one fact: I am the responsible officer of government.”

  No one—especially in the CIA, the military, organized crime, or in the Cuban exile community—would forget this acceptance of responsibility.

  Following a shake-up in US intelligence over the Bay of Pigs disaster—Kennedy fired Dulles and Cabell—attorney general Robert Kennedy took over responsibility for Cuban affairs.

  Soon another war—this one much darker and more secret—was being waged against Castro under the code name “JM/WAVE.” This program operated on the campus of the University of Miami under the cover of an electronics firm called Zenith Technological Services. On November 3, 1961, JM/WAVE came under Operation Mongoose, the ongoing covert mission against Castro also known as the “Cuban Project.” It was headed by Air Force General Edward Lansdale, already acknowledged as an expert on nation building due to his fighting communists in the Philippines following World War II. He advocated action in the social, economic, and political aspects of a country as well as aggressive military operations. A 1958 book titled The Ugly American was a thinly disguised account of the experiences of Lansdale and others in Southeast Asia.

  By mid-1962, Operation Mongoose involved nearly 600 CIA case officers, as many as 3,000 contract agents, and numerous fronts such as boat shops, detective and travel agencies, and gun stores. With nearly a quarter million Cuban refugees living in the United States, it was easy to find those with a burning passion to liberate their island and return home.

  The operation out of the JM/WAVE station was inconsistent from the start. President Kennedy stated “all actions should be kept at a low key,” while his brother Robert told CIA officials “no time, money, effort—or manpower—should be spared.”

  The near-nightly raids on Cuba—landing saboteurs, dropping propaganda leaflets, and conducting occasional military-style raids—actually achieved very little except to confirm Castro’s accusations that the United States was guilty of aggression.

  Today several of the military and intelligence officials who were dealing with President Kennedy during this period say they believed that the assassination of Castro was to be a part of this “Cuban crusade.” However, there is no supporting documentation, and in fact the only documentation available indicates quite the opposite.

  Early in 1962, Robert Kennedy was trying to prosecute a top Mafia boss named Sam Giancana, when he found the CIA interceding on Giancana’s behalf. Pursuing the matter, Kennedy was finally told about the earlier deals between the CIA and Mafia to kill Castro. According to CIA attorney Lawrence Houston, the attorney general ordered a halt to dealings with the Mafia. The younger Kennedy later told aides, “I stopped it. . . . I found out that some people were going to try an attempt on Castro’s life and I turned it off.”

  However, the lethal partnership between the agency and the crime syndicate didn’t stop until well after President Kennedy was assassinated, indicating the CIA continued to operate out of control even after the agency shake-up following the Bay of Pigs disaster.

  Whatever the Kennedys’ role in Castro assassination plots, they got nowhere. Castro outlived both Kennedys and there is now some evidence to suggest that the CIA-Mafia plots may have been nothing more than a “scam” on the part of organized crime to gain leverage over the government.

  The o
ngoing tension with Cuba took on a more serious and urgent tone when on October 22, 1962, Kennedy announced that US reconnaissance aircraft—the same U-2 spy plane that had ended Eisenhower’s hopes for the 1960 summit meeting—had photographed offensive missile sites with nuclear capability being constructed in Cuba.

  President Kennedy called for emergency meetings of the United Nations Security Council and the Organization of American States. He also ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba and vowed full retaliation against Russia if a nuclear warhead was launched from Cuba.

  As Soviet ships carrying missiles approached the US naval blockade of Cuba, the world watched and trembled. Nuclear holocaust seemed imminent. Then Americans were told that the Soviets blinked. Their freighters turned back and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Only much later did the American people learn that Kennedy had accepted a proposal from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev that included a pledge from the United States to remove its missiles from Turkey and never to invade or support any invasion of Cuba, in exchange for Russia’s withdrawal of the Cuban missiles.

  But Kennedy’s diplomacy in ending the missile crisis, perhaps unknown to the lower ranks, earned him further rebuke by military and CIA officers who believed the presence of missiles justified a US invasion of Cuba and the elimination of the Castro regime. These suspicions only made the military and intelligence officers, along with their Cuban protégés, more convinced that Kennedy was “soft on communism.”

  In March 1962, General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended, and the Joint Chiefs approved, a plan to turn public opinion against Castro called Operation Northwoods. These plans called for conducting “false-flag” operations in the United States—hijacking American airliners and ships, setting off bombs in American cities, and even assassinations. All this was to be blamed on Castro’s Cuba.

  President Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods and demoted Lemnitzer, and senior military officers ordered the documents destroyed. But someone slipped up and ironically the papers were discovered in the early 1990s by the Assassination Records Review Board, created to gather documents related to Kennedy’s assassination.

  Beginning in 1963, the Cubans found US government support for their continuing efforts against Castro to be nonexistent. In fact, moves were under way to stop exile action against Cuba.

  The clamp-down on exile activity, whether sincere or official window dressing, marked the beginning of a new relationship with both Cuba and the Soviet Union—and a change of tactics by JFK.

  Kennedy used Jean Daniel, a journalist with the French newspaper L’Express, as an unofficial contact with Castro. On October 24, 1963, Kennedy met with Daniel and urged him to pass along his good intentions to the Cuban premier during a scheduled interview in Havana. Daniel did meet with Castro and reported that the Cuban leader said:

  I believe Kennedy is sincere. I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this . . . in the last analysis, I’m convinced that anyone else would be worse. . . . You can tell him that I’m willing to declare [Sen. Barry] Goldwater my friend if it will guarantee Kennedy’s reelection!

  Ironically, Daniel was with Castro on November 22, when the Cuban leader received word of Kennedy’s assassination. “Es una mala noticia [This is bad news],” Castro said three times, adding, “All will have to be rethought. I’ll tell you one thing; at least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed. You watch and see . . . I know that they will try to put the blame on us for this thing.”

  Castro was correct. From the day of the assassination, there was an effort to lay the blame on him.

  But the attempt to reconcile relations with Castro had not been strictly unofficial. On September 17, 1963, ambassador Seydou Diallo of Guinea in West Africa brought word to William Attwood, then a special adviser to the US delegation to the United Nations and a former US ambassador to Guinea, that Castro wanted to reach some sort of understanding with the Kennedy administration. According to Diallo, Castro was unhappy at being forced to align closely with the Soviet Union and wanted to normalize relations with the United States. Attwood reported Diallo’s conversation to his superior, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who telephoned President Kennedy. Kennedy directed Stevenson to have Attwood meet with Cuban UN delegate Carlos Lechuga. This led to discreet meetings between Attwood and Lechuga, where they decided that Attwood would travel to Cuba for direct meetings with Castro.

  Although these unprecedented approaches to Cuba were strictly secret, it is almost certain that people within US intelligence were aware of the rapprochement. Attorney general Robert Kennedy himself told Attwood the secret maneuvering was “bound to leak.”

  Three days after Kennedy’s assassination, Attwood was formally notified that Havana was ready to proceed with a meeting. President Lyndon Johnson was briefed on the situation, but he turned a cold shoulder. Attwood sadly told author Anthony Summers, “The word came back that this was to be put on ice for the time being, and the time being has been ever since.”

  Besides Miami, the next largest operational area for militant anti-Castro Cubans was the city of New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald’s birthplace. It was there that numerous leads have been developed linking the CIA, the FBI, anti-Castro Cubans, and military intelligence with Oswald.

  Oswald’s interest in Cuba went back to his Marine days, when he and Marine buddy Nelson Delgado toyed with the idea of traveling to Cuba and assisting Castro in his war against Batista. There was nothing unusual here. That same idea had crossed the minds of thousands of daydreaming American schoolboys.

  But in Oswald’s case, this dream may have taken on some reality. According to Delgado, the Marine Oswald began receiving letters plainly stamped with the seal of the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles. Oswald once traveled to Los Angeles with Delgado, saying his purpose was to “visit the Cuban consulate.” There also were reports of Oswald’s meeting with mysterious strangers, whom Delgado believed had to do with “the Cuban business.”

  Gerry Patrick Hemming, a Marine with Oswald who was recruited into the CIA, has told of meeting Oswald in the Cuban consulate. Hemming, himself working for naval intelligence, said Oswald seemed to be “an informant or some type of agent working for somebody.”

  On April 24, 1963, less than a year after arriving back in Fort Worth from Russia, Oswald packed a bag and bought a bus ticket for New Orleans, telling Marina and friends that he couldn’t find a job in Texas.

  Shortly before leaving for New Orleans, he had written a letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a pro-Castro organization headquartered in New York City and the object of intense scrutiny by various US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and Army intelligence. Oswald praised Castro and asked for FPCC pamphlets, membership applications, and advice on tactics. He also mentioned he “was thinking about renting a small office at my own expense.”

  The FPCC director, V. T. Lee, promptly answered, saying the committee faced serious opposition and warned Oswald against provoking “unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters.” It was advice that Oswald would totally ignore.

  Staying with relatives in New Orleans, Oswald managed to get a job at the William B. Reily Co., a coffee manufacturer. The company’s owner, William Reily, was a financial backer of the Crusade to Free Cuba Committee, one of the many front groups raising money for the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Oswald actually may have been placed within Reily as an operative. His job apparently was to distinguish which of the Cuban exiles at both the firm and in New Orleans were genuine anti-Castroites and which were Castro spies.

  Through the spring and summer of 1963, Oswald, an avid reader, checked out twenty-seven books from the New Orleans Library. His reading ran from Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels to Aldous Huxley and science fiction. Library records show Oswald also read two books about John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage and Portrait of a President. Oswald checked out nothing about Cuba.

  In fact, it was during this time t
hat a strange incident occurred that throws further doubt on Oswald’s sincerity as a communist sympathizer. In July 1963, Oswald accompanied his uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret, to a Jesuit seminary in Mobile, Alabama, where a cousin was enrolled. Here Oswald made what audience members thought was a well-constructed speech against Soviet-style communism. He took the opposite position from his procommunist public posturing over the previous few months in New Orleans—further evidence that Oswald was living some sort of dual life.

  Back in New Orleans, this duplicity continued. Although Oswald handed out leaflets for the FPCC and continued to write to the national organization, his New Orleans chapter was a complete fraud. He even had his wife sign the name “Hidell” as president of his New Orleans chapter of the FPCC.

  While there has been no documented evidence—a few letters to the FPCC aside—that Oswald was in contact with any pro-Castro group, he definitely was in touch with anti-Castro Cubans. On August 5, 1963, Oswald entered a store owned by Cuban militant Carlos Bringuier, a man with connections to both the Cuban Revolutionary Council and the CIA. Oswald told Bringuier and friends that he was a Marine veteran with experience in guerrilla warfare and offered to train Cuban exiles. Pushing his point, Oswald returned the next day with a Marine training manual, which he left with Bringuier. He again said he wanted to join the fight against Castro.

  Bringuier already was on guard. In his Warren Commission testimony, he said that some time earlier he had been interviewed by FBI agent Warren De Brueys, who had told him the bureau might try to infiltrate his anti-Castro organization.

  Three days later, Bringuier was shocked when a friend rushed into his store and said that the same man who had wanted to train exiles was on the New Orleans streets passing out pro-Castro literature. Bringuier and others sought out Oswald and confronted him. A crowd gathered as Bringuier railed against this “communist” who had tried to infiltrate the exiles. Losing his temper, Bringuier cursed Oswald, threw his leaflets into the air, then drew back his fist as if to strike. Oswald, who kept smiling throughout this episode, said, “Okay, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.”