by Gus Russo
The poll results on Cuba clearly reflected hard-hitting press coverage of Republican attacks on Kennedy. GOP Senators Homer Capehart of Indiana and Kenneth Keating of New York were demanding action, with Capehart saying, “The U.S. has every right to land troops, take possession of Havana, and occupy the country.”7 More distressing were Democrats such as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Kennedy’s friend George Smathers of Florida, who broke party ranks and demanded military action.
Usually loyal to the administration, the liberal press took up the Cuban exiles’ cause, praising their efforts to overthrow Castro. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the British press often ran uncritical pieces about exile raids on the island, referring to them in heroic language.
In retrospect, the Kennedy administration’s actions in the fall of 1963 make it clear that the president considered a victory over Castro in 1963-64 to be politically crucial. Yet, practically speaking, an all-out American invasion of the island was out of the question unless and until three components fell into place: the Cuban exiles’ initial involvement; a revolt by the Cuban military; and the assassination of Castro himself. At least one powerful man in the CIA doubted the pieces would come together to permit that sort of major action. “Kennedy wasn’t going to invade Cuba, for goddamn sure,” Richard Helms has said.8
Effective action had to take the form of a Cuban insurrection, followed by U.S. support—the essence of OPLAN 380-63. As one CIA officer concluded recently, “Kennedy wanted to deal with Cuba in a way that wouldn’t draw in the Soviet Union.” This explains part of the thinking behind “the crackdown” on exile operations considered uncontrollable. There was no desire to return to the Cold War terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a bragging point on the campaign stump, Kennedy couldn’t afford to forget the fact that relations were warming ever so slightly with the USSR. As has been noted, the origins of the thaw can be traced to Kennedy’s speech on June 10, 1963 at American University. Many scholars point to this initiative as John Kennedy’s most visionary accomplishment. And Kennedy knew it. However, the obsession with Cuba continued unabated. And as historian Herbert Parmet implies, Kennedy operations like AM/LASH and AM/TRUNK “made a mockery” of the eloquent “Peace Speech.”
Thus in late 1963, the Kennedy brothers decided to pull out all the stops in dealing with the Castro problem. They even considered, briefly, making peace. Finally, a simple plan evolved: Remove Castro or get him to make peace on U.S. terms, whichever came first—with both scenarios having to play out before the 1964 presidential elections. Ironically, Kennedy was now handcuffed by secrecy, much as Richard Nixon had been in the 1960 elections. Unable to counter his critics by revealing his secret anti-Castro operations, he needed results. The resulting strategy would become known as the “two track” approach. In fact, the energy devoted to the peace overtures was dwarfed by that devoted to killing and overthrowing the dictator Castro.
Track One: Peace
“How can you figure him out?”
—Fidel Castro, October 1963, speaking of President Kennedy and his simultaneous peace and sabotage policies9
Not only did Kennedy develop a simultaneous two-track policy (peace and sabotage), but the peace gambit itself was two-pronged. The prongs consisted of overtures by an American broadcast journalist, Lisa Howard, and a French journalist, Jean Daniel, with the same U.S. diplomat, William Attwood, facilitating both entrées.
In September 1963, William Attwood, the special advisor for African Affairs at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, began receiving hints from fellow U.N. associates and a press correspondent that Castro might be willing to enter “détente” talks with the United States. The Guinean ambassador to Cuba, Sékou Touré, told Attwood he had reason to believe that Castro was prepared to make “substantial concessions” to the United States in order to achieve a normalization of relations. Around the same time, according to Attwood, “Lisa Howard, an ABC correspondent, told me she’d recently interviewed Castro in Havana and was convinced he’d like to restore communications with the U.S.”10
Often referred to as a “spirited” news reporter from New York, Lisa Howard was the perfect American-Cuban peacemaker. She was a strong admirer of President Kennedy, and on friendly terms with the Cuban dictator. Besides all that, Howard was an attractive and talented newsperson. As the only woman in the country with her own network news show, she had scored many journalistic coups, including interviews with such “untouchables” as the Shah of Iran, Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro, with whom she spoke several times. In addition, she had long pursued a personal quest to help normalize the Kennedy-Castro relationship.
At a cocktail party Lisa Howard arranged to explore the subject, William Attwood approached the chief Cuban delegate to the U.N., Dr. Carlos Lechuga Hevia, who authenticated the offer. “He said Castro had hoped to establish some sort of contact with Kennedy after he became president in 1961,” remembers Attwood, “but the Bay of Pigs ended any chance of that.” Lechuga said Castro was intrigued by “the Peace Speech.” The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Adlai Stevenson, passed the response along to the administration. Kennedy agreed in principle to pursue the overture, but insisted that any meeting with Castro would have to be secret and occur outside of Cuba (possibly in Mexico). The meetings, JFK also suggested, should be brokered by a third party unaffiliated with politics.
The next move along this track involved the editor of the French socialist newsweekly L’Observateur. Jean Daniel had been scheduled to interview Fidel Castro in November. In early October, he was drafted to perform a simultaneous diplomatic mission. Daniel, as the chosen “third party,” was briefed by his old friend Attwood that Castro might be receptive to a gesture of peace from President Kennedy.
Attwood, through his friendship with JFK confidante Ben Bradlee, arranged for Daniel to meet with Kennedy before going on to Havana. On October 24th, Daniel met with the President, who expressed his lack of confidence in Castro, and complained that Castro had betrayed the revolution.11 Nonetheless, Kennedy instructed Daniel to determine if Castro’s recent positive response to a Kennedy peace overture was genuine.
Daniel was to meet with Castro in the third week of November—the same week Kennedy was to be in Dallas on his first campaign stop for the 1964 election.12 In fact, on November 22nd, Daniel was with Castro when he received the news of Kennedy’s assassination. At first, Castro seemed dismayed, but upon hearing the news that Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as Kennedy’s successor, quickly asked Daniel, “What authority does he [Johnson] exercise over the CIA?”13
On October 31, 1963, Lisa Howard telephoned a Castro aide, Major Rene Vallejo, attempting to set a secret summit in motion. According to a friend, Howard arranged for Attwood and Robert Kennedy to meet clandestinely with Castro. Vallejo called Howard, affirming that Castro would go along with any secrecy provisions President Kennedy required. On November 19th, Presidential aide McGeorge Bundy informed Attwood that the President would be available to pursue the rapprochement after “a brief trip to Dallas.”14
That would appear to be the end of the episode, except that after one of Howard’s meetings with Castro, her opinion of the Kennedys, especially Bobby, changed drastically. When Bobby ran for the Senate in New York in 1964 against Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating, Lisa Howard (considered a kingpin in the Lexington Democratic Club) joined with Jacqueline Kennedy relative Gore Vidal to form an organization called “Democrats for Keating.” She had come to detest Bobby Kennedy, describing him at the first meeting as:
The very antithesis of his brother, the late President. He is ruthless, reactionary, and dangerously authoritarian. We feel he must be stopped now. . . if you feel strongly about something like this, you can’t remain silent—you have to show courage and stand up and be counted.15
Debating pro-Kennedy lawyers two weeks later, she expanded on the theme, sniping, “Brothers are not necessarily the same. There was Cain and Abel.”
The question lingers: W
hy did Lisa Howard turn against Bobby Kennedy? Former FBI agent William Turner offers a possible explanation: “Friends said she had learned from Cuban sources that all the while she was talking peace to Castro for the Kennedys, the morally flexible brothers were indulging in invasion and assassination plans against him.”16
It has been posited that Howard obtained her information about the plots from either Lechuga, at the cocktail party mentioned earlier, or from Castro himself. Either is plausible. Recall that Lechuga was the alleged recipient of the letters of Fernando Fernandez, who had penetrated the exile operations in New Orleans. Fernandez admitted to the FBI that Lechuga ran a pro-Castro terrorist network, adding, “The subversive and espionage activities are directed by the Cuban ambassadors in the United Nations and in Brazil.”17
This assertion seems valid when one takes into account the arrest one year earlier of a pro-Castro terrorist cell operating in New York City. The three arrestees possessed huge quantities of explosives they intended to use against large department stores such as Macy’s, Gimbel’s, and Bloomingdale’s when the stores were clogged with Christmas shoppers. One of the terrorists was an aide to Lechuga, while another traveled to New York with Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticos, a friend of Rolando Cubela (AM/LASH). Even more disturbing, these terrorists belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Oswald claimed to be a member, and with whom he maintained a continuing correspondence.18
Also of note is the fact that Lechuga had an affair with none other than Sylvia Duran, who admitted—to a CIA plant in the Cuban Embassy—to being Lee Oswald’s Mexican lover as well.19 This relationship opens up a myriad of intriguing possibilities, given the many possible directions for the potential flow of information:
Was Oswald linked to a pro-Castro network which had links to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Carlos Lechuga, and the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City?
Because Rolando Cubela (AM/LASH) was known to frequent the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, where he was originally contacted by the CIA, could Duran have obtained sensitive information about that operation from her lover Lechuga and passed it on to Oswald? Likewise, could Lisa Howard have learned the same details from Lechuga (who attended the original Lisa Howard cocktail party)?
Had Oswald learned of AM/TRUNK or AM/LASH in New Orleans (where these two operations were known about in certain circles) and informed Duran, who then informed Lechuga and other Embassy personnel?
The point here is that the official investigators of Kennedy’s assassination had no inkling that all the critical elements intersected in the Cuban Embassy.
Two weeks after her anti-Kennedy lambast, Lisa Howard was fired by ABC News, ostensibly because she had “chosen to participate publicly in partisan political activity contrary to long-established ABC News policy.”20 Eight months later, she was found dead, the victim of a barbiturate overdose that many consider suspicious. Her friend and colleague Craig Karpel said, “Lisa just wasn’t the type to kill herself. She was too dynamic, too dedicated, too sure of herself ever to admit defeat in that ultimate way.”
Whatever her source on the administration’s plotting, it was clear that Lisa Howard had stumbled onto “Track Two.”
Track Two: Invasion and Assassination
“It [our Cuban policy] was just an either/or situation. That went on frequently,” Kennedy’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk said recently. Rusk admitted that, with Cuba, the Kennedys were “playing with fire.”21
In Congressional testimony, the CIA’s Richard Helms clarified Kennedy’s policy, terming the accommodation efforts with Castro a “feint,” saying, “Like most two-track policies, try everything.” In implementation, stated Helms, the administration’s “real energy” on Cuba was channeled into covert action.22 The disclosures of the last thirty years have proven Helms correct (witness AM/LASH. AM/TRUNK, OPLAN 380-63, and Artime’s Second Naval Guerrilla).
A Naval Intelligence officer stationed in Guantanamo in the fall of 1963 remembered firsthand the Kennedys’ frustration with the lack of success in their secret war against Cuba. The officer recalled, “In 1963, the Kennedys sent down Joseph Califano—the head of Bobby Kennedy’s Cuban Coordinating Committee—and he fired everybody.”23 In September 1963, the administration’s aggression went into higher gear. Between October 3rd and October 24th, twenty-one more acts of Cuban sabotage were approved.24
“We were making more of an effort through espionage and sabotage in August, September, and October,” Robert Kennedy himself later confirmed. “It was better organized that it had been before and it was having quite an effect. I mean, there were ten or twenty tons of sugar cane that were being burned every week through internal uprisings.”25
The Kennedys’ commitment to these sabotage attempts, more extensive than their interest in peace with Cuba, was clear even to the men and women directly involved in the “secret war” effort. One of those at the troop level, Army Captain Bradley Ayers, was deep in the Florida Everglades shortly after the October sabotage authorizations, planning for the newest raid—an oil refinery attack. When night had fallen, Ayers heard the distinctive whirr of a helicopter. The copter sported a West Palm Beach air service name on its tail boom. Soon, two men emerged from a Quonset hut. One of the men was the JM/WAVE assistant Chief, Gordon Campbell. The other was Robert Kennedy. Recall that this was the second time Ayers had seen RFK in Florida. The first was right after the June 19 “autonomous operations” authorization by JFK.
“Kennedy had apparently come over from the family compound in West Palm Beach to inspect preparations at the Everglades camp,” Ayers later wrote. As Campbell escorted Kennedy to his waiting chopper, the Attorney General passed Ayers, shook his hand, and wished him luck on his mission.
“If the President felt strongly enough to send his brother, something very big was being planned,” Ayers reasoned. Campbell explained to Ayers, “Everybody from the President on down has his eyes on this one. . . If we can hit Castro a couple of good blows like this, he’ll fall right on his ass. . . and that’s what the President wants.” Ayers soon learned that “the down-to-the-last details were approved by Bobby Kennedy.”26
Ayers concluded the obvious: “The President and his brother were tough, smart politicians, and the elections were getting closer.”
Also in the fall of 1963, Harry Williams and Manuel Artime, coordinating with Bobby Kennedy, were hard at work training a new Cuban invasion force in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, under the auspices of the Second Naval Guerrilla contingent. AM/TRUNK and OPLAN 380-63 were all timed to commence in the coming months, despite the fact that Castro had heavily infiltrated these operations with his own spies. The frenzy of operations was aimed at settling the Cuba problem before the 1964 presidential election. To guarantee success, the coup de grace known as AM/LASH was now placed on the front burner.
AM/LASH Reactivated
‘‘AM/LASH was a product of Bobby’s pressure on Des [FitzGerald]. The CIA was there to take the rap for the President.”
—Jim Flannery, CIA officer stationed in Mexico City and Tokyo27
“The objective as I understood it—why we were doing all this—was in order to foment a military coup, internal coup, against Castro.”
—Nestor Sanchez, AM/LASH’s CIA case officer28
On September 7, 1963, Cuban Army Major Rolando Cubela Secades, a Castro insider, met two CIA agents in Porto Alegre, Brazil. One of them was Nestor Sanchez, a career CIA officer, who had been working closely with such CIA luminaries as Seymour Bolton, Bill Harvey, and Des FitzGerald, and who had worked in the propaganda section of the Cuba Desk (Task Force W). Sanchez would later testify that his role at Task Force W was “to develop assets inside Cuba that could be used in a coup against Castro.”29 The Spanish-speaking Sanchez traveled to Brazil, on Des FitzGerald’s orders, to meet Cubela. It was thought that he might gain rapport with Cubela while functioning simultaneously as a translator. He would later become Cubela’s CIA case officer.
Cubela i
nformed Sanchez and his fellow CIA agent that he was ready to perform an “inside job” against Castro. This offer was communicated to CIA Headquarters the same day. AM/LASH, the operation that, according to Harry Williams and Manuel Artime, was initially proposed by JFK (and coordinated by Kennedy friend Des FitzGerald), was back in stir.30
After Bobby Kennedy’s Cuban Coordinating Group met on September 12, 1963, clandestine meetings between Sanchez and Cubela escalated. Cubela told Sanchez that he would assassinate Castro, provided it was in conjunction with a coup d’etat. Sanchez, known to Cubela only as “Nicolas Sanson,” assured him that such a coup was under consideration at the “highest levels.” Cubela made two other requests: he had specific ideas about which weapons should be used in the hit (he wanted rifles and explosives), and he wanted to meet with Bobby Kennedy (given the CIA code name “GPFOCUS”) to obtain his pledge of U.S. support. Sanchez/Sanson cabled this request to CIA headquarters on October 11.31
On the very day that Cubela cabled FitzGerald with his request for Kennedy’s authorization, Des FitzGerald called and spoke with Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. The topic of their conversation is not noted on paper, but can be easily surmised. It was the only call (at least recorded on paper) that Kennedy took from FitzGerald during the fall of 1963.32 Soon (Oct. 29) FitzGerald, using the pseudonym “James Clark,” was off to Paris with the “high level” assurance Cubela had requested.
In 1994, FitzGerald’s planning memo for the Paris meeting was released. It states, in part, that FitzGerald “will represent self as personal representative of GPFOCUS [Robert Kennedy] who traveled [to] Paris for specific purpose [of] meeting AM/LASH/1 and giving him full assurances of United States support if there is a change of the present government in Cuba.”33 As shall be seen, this and subsequent memos omit the more sinister subjects that were to be discussed at the meeting. Cubela told the HSCA, “I didn’t know this man was FitzGerald, but due to the [Church Committee] Final Report, I realized that it was. He told me that he came representing [Robert] Kennedy.”34
