In March I960, President
Dwight
Eisenhower of
the United States approved a Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)
plan to overthrow Fidel
Castro. The plan
involved a budget of $13 million to train "a paramilitary force
outside Cuba for guerrilla action." The strategy was organised
by Richard Bissell and Richard
Helms.
In
September 1960, Allen
W. Dulles, the director of the CIA, initiated talks with two leading
figures of the Mafia, Johnny
Roselli and
Sam
Giancana.
Later, other crime bosses such as Carlos
Marcello,
Santos
Trafficante and Meyer
Lansky
became involved in this plot against Castro.
After the Bay
of Pigs disaster President John
F. Kennedy
created a committee (SGA) charged with overthrowing
Castro's government. The
SGA, chaired by Robert
F. Kennedy (Attorney
General), included Allen
W. Dulles
(CIA
Director), later replaced by John
McCone,
Alexis Johnson (State Department), McGeorge
Bundy (National Security Adviser), Roswell Gilpatric (Defence
Department), General Lyman Lemnitzer (Joint Chiefs of Staff) and General
Maxwell Taylor. Although not officially
members, Dean Rusk (Secretary of State)
and Robert
S. McNamara (Secretary
of Defence) also attending meetings.
At a meeting of this committee
at the White House on 4th November, 1961, it was decided to call this
covert action program for sabotage and subversion against Cuba, Operation
Mongoose. Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy also
decided that General Edward
Lansdale (Staff
Member of the President's Committee on Military Assistance) should
be placed in charge of the operation.
The CIA JM/WAVE
station in Miami
served as operational headquarters for Operation Mongoose. The head
of the station was Ted
Shackley and
over the next few months became very involved in the attempt to overthrow
Fidel
Castro.
One of Lansdale's first decisions was to appoint William
Harvey as head of Task Force W.
Harvey's brief was to organize a broad range of activities that would
help to bring down Castro's government.
Sidney
Gottlieb of the CIA Technical Services Division was asked to come
up with proposals that would undermine Castro's popularity with the
Cuban people. Plans included a scheme to spray a television studio
in which he was about to appear with an hallucinogenic drug and contaminating
his shoes with thallium which they believed would cause the hair in
his beard to fall out.
On 12th March, 1961, William
Harvey arranged for CIA operative, Jim O'Connell, to meet Sam
Giancana, Santo
Trafficante,
Johnny
Roselli
and Robert
Maheu
at the Fontainebleau Hotel.
During the meeting O'Connell gave poison pills and $10,000 to Rosselli
to be used against Fidel
Castro.
As Richard D. Mahoney points out in
his book: Sons and Brothers: "Late
one evening, probably March 13, Rosselli passed the poison pills and
the money to a small, reddish-haired Afro-Cuban by the name of Rafael
"Macho" Gener in the Boom Boom Room, a location Giancana
thought "stupid." Rosselli's purpose, however, was not just
to assassinate Castro but to set up the Mafia's partner in crime,
the United States government. Accordingly, he was laying a long, bright
trail of evidence that unmistakably implicated the CIA in the Castro
plot. This evidence, whose purpose was blackmail, would prove critical
in the CIA's cover-up of the Kennedy assassination."
Lansdale also brought into
Operation Mongoose a group of CIA operatives who had successfully
overthrown President Jacobo
Arbenz of
Guatemala in 1954. This included Tracy
Barnes,
David
Atlee Phillips,
David
Sanchez Morales,
William
(Rip) Robertson
and E.
Howard Hunt.
The
Federal
Bureau of Investigation had
to be brought into this plan as part of the deal involved protection
against investigations against the Mafia in the United States. Castro
was later to complain
that there were twenty ClA-sponsered attempts on his life. Eventually
Johnny Roselli and his friends became
convinced that the Cuban revolution could not be reversed by simply
removing its leader. However, they continued to play along with this
CIA plot in order to prevent them being prosecuted for criminal offences
committed in the United States.
Robert
F. Kennedy
now took the leading role in trying to overthrow Fidel
Castro. At a
meeting in November, 1961, Kennedy accused Bissell of "not doing
anything about getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime."
CIA agent Sam Halpern complained that "Bobby (Kennedy) wanted
boom and bang all over the island... it was stupid... the pressure
from the White House was very great." Bissell did what he could
to arrange the assassination of Castro. This included asking William
Harvey to
take over the Mafia contracts from Sheffield
Edwards.
To counteract this policy
Nikita
Khrushchev sent Castro help. By October, 1962, the Soviet
Union had 40,000 soldiers, 1,300 field pieces, 700 anti-aircraft
guns, 350 tanks and 150 jets in Cuba in
order to deter another invasion. He also began supplying Castro with
nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
In 1962 Desmond
FitzGerald was appointed Chief of the Cuban Task Force. In this
post he personally organized three different plots to assassinate
Fidel
Castro. This included working with Rolando
Cubela, a senior official in Castro's government.
He
was given the codename AM/LASH and reported to JM/WAVE.
However, Joseph Langosch, of the Special Affairs Staff, suspected
that Cubela was a "dangle" (a double agent recruited by
Castro
to
penetrate the American plots against him". This idea was reinforced
when Cubela refused to take a lie-detector test.
In September,
1963, Cubela had a
meeting with the CIA in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
It was suggested that Cubela should assassinate Fidel
Castro.
According to a CIA report Cubela asked for a meeting with Robert
Kennedy:
"for assurances of U.S. moral support for any activity Cubela
under took in Cuba." This was not possible but FitzGerald, now
Chief of the Cuban Task Force, agreed to meet Cubela. Ted
Shackley was
opposed to the idea as he was now convinced that Cubela was a double-agent.
Desmond
FitzGerald and Nestor Sanchez met Cubela met in Paris on 29th
October, 1963. Cubela
requested a "high-powered, silenced rifle with an effective range
of hundreds of thousands of yards" in order to kill Fidel Castro.
The CIA refused and instead insisted on Cubela used poison. On 22nd
November, 1963, FitzGerald handed over a pen/syringe. He was told
to use Black Leaf 40 (a deadly poison) to kill Castro. As Cubela was
leaving the meeting, he was informed that President John
F. Kennedy had
been assassinated.
On 7th April, 1964, the
SGA officially brought an end to the sabotage
operations against Cuba. John
McCone,
director of the CIA, stated that President
Lyndon B. Johnson had abandoned the
goal of overthrowing or "eliminating" Castro.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Chauncey
Holt was interviewed
by John Craig,
Phillip Rogers and Gary
Shaw for
Newsweek magazine (19th October, 1991)
There may be certain
types of assassination that they're good at, but other types they're
not. So they enlisted the better known names, Giancana, Roselli, in
Operation Mongoose. And you had Edward Lansdale, and William King
Harvey, all the guys who became legends. And there is no use in expounding
on their careers and how they got involved in this.
Also, one
of the lesser known people involved in this was Peter Licavoli. Licavoli
was a confidant, close to both Giancana and Roselli. And he had a
ranch in Tucson, Arizona. It was very nicely placed and had a landing
strip on it. So he was involved in Mongoose because of the location
(of his ranch), and it was a nice place to have meetings and they
had meetings there. His involvement in Mongoose was a marginal type
thing.
I really don't
think that Roselli or Giancana or Maheu ever were all that serious
about knocking off Castro. They wanted to get some leverage against
the government. They were trying to deport Roselli, the were chasing
Giancana all over the landscape and they were willing to use anything
they could to actually give them an edge.
(2)
Richard
Bissell,
Reflections of a Cold Warrior (1996)
(The Mafia-connection aspect) did not originate with me - and I had
no desire to become personally involved in its implementation, mainly
because I was not competent to handle relations with the Mafia. It
is true, however, that, when the idea was presented to me, I supported
it, and as Deputy Director for Plans I was responsible for the necessary
decisions.... Sheffield Edwards, the director of the Agency's Office
of Security - and his deputy became the case officers for the Agency's
relations with the Mafia. Edwards was frank with me about his efforts,
and I authorized him to continue... I do not recall any specific contact
with the Mafia, but Doris Mirage, my secretary at the time, does...
I hoped the Mafia would
achieve success. My philosophy during my last two or three years in
the Agency was very definitely that the end justified the means, and
I was not going to be held back. Shortly after I left the CIA, however,
I came to believe that it had been a mistake to involve the Mafia
in an assassination attempt. This is partly a moral judgment, but
I must admit it is also partly a pragmatic judgment.
(3)
Richard
D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers:
The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (1999)
Late one evening, probably March 13, Rosselli passed the poison pills
and the money to a small, reddish-haired Afro-Cuban by the name of
Rafael "Macho" Gener in the Boom Boom Room, a location Giancana
thought "stupid."
Rosselli's purpose, however,
was not just to assassinate Castro but to set up the Mafia's partner
in crime, the United States government. Accordingly, he was laying
a long, bright trail of evidence that unmistakably implicated the
CIA in the Castro plot. This evidence, whose purpose was blackmail,
would prove critical in the CIA's cover-up of the Kennedy assassination.
(4)
Leroy
Fletcher Prouty, An
Introduction to the Assassination Business (1975)
Assassination is big business.
It is the business of the CIA and any other power that can pay for
the "hit" and control the assured getaway. The CIA brags
that its operations in Iran in 1953 led to the pro-Western attitude
of that important country. The CIA also takes credit for what it calls
the "perfect job" in Guatemala. Both successes were achieved
by assassination. What is this assassination business and how does
it work?
In most countries there
is little or no provision for change of political power. Therefore
the strongman stays in power until he dies or until he is removed
by a coup d'etat - which often means by assassination...
The CIA has many gadgets
in its arsenal and has spent years training thousands of people how
to use them. Some of these people, working perhaps for purposes and
interests other than the CIA's, use these items to carry out burglaries,
assassinations, and other unlawful activities - with or without the
blessing of the CIA.
(5)
Christopher
Sharrett, Fair
Play Magazine, The
Assassination of John F. Kennedy as Coup D'Etat (May,
1999)
One phase of this
narrative is represented in Gus Russo's Live by the Sword.
The moralistic biblical admonition of this book's title offers its
thesis: Kennedy got what he deserved. Russo's conception of the Kennedy
brothers portrays them as the ultimate Cold Warriors, with RFK the
instigator of plots against Fidel Castro that LBJ wanted to hide in
the aftermath of the assassination in order to prevent a war with
the Soviet Union. According to this narrative, LBJ believed that "Castro
killed Kennedy in retaliation," an idea that has long had currency
in the mass media. But this discourse ignores a large part of the
historical record. Marvin Watson, a Johnson staffer, told the Washington
Post in 1977 that Johnson "thought there was a plot in connection
with the assassination," and that "the CIA had had something
to do with the plot."
On the matter of RFK being
the guilt-ridden instigator of the Castro plots, anguished that he
had caused his brother's death due to his anti-Castro obsessions,
we should note that Robert Kennedy exploded in front of assistants
Peter Edelman and Adam Walinsky after he read the Jack Anderson column
that put into play the idea of RFK as craftsman of the Castro assassination
plots. RFK complained "I didn't start it, I stopped it. I found
out that some people were going to try an attempt on Castro's life
and turned it off. A recent Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary
on the Kennedy assassination includes taped remarks by RFK speaking
very derisively of CIA covert operations specialist William Harvey.
RFK termed Harvey's ideas "half-assed" and potentially very
damaging to the United States. Recently declassified CIA documents
about its use of hoodlums to penetrate the Cuban Revolution and assassinate
its leaders demonstrate that the Agency didn't brief RFK. Gus Russo
perpetuates the claim that RFK was convinced that Castro killed his
brother, ignoring evidence that RFK contacted Jim Garrison (since
RFK took seriously the notion of a domestic plot), and that he was
concerned with the possibility that the CIA may have had involvement
in the assassination.
(6)
Nathaniel
Weyl, Encounters With Communism
(2003)
Toward the close of the
Kennedy Administration, an American of non-Hispanic origin, called
on me at our oceanfront place in Highland Beach, Florida. He wanted
to interest me in a plan to send commandos secretly into Cuba to blow
up the petroleum storage facilities in the Havana area. This seemed
to me a senseless and criminal terrorist act.
Sabotaging oil facilities
would deprive the Cuban people of a vital resource without necessarily
weakening the dictatorial regime. Since we were not at war with Cuba,
any incidental loss of life would constitute murder.
I told the mysterious person
who approached me that this was not the sort of thing I do and that
I was not interested.
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