The Kennedy assassination: Did Castro know in advance?

Posted on Saturday, 03.17.12

The Kennedy assassination: Did Castro know in advance?

A new book by former CIA analyst Brian Latell details evidence that
Cuban intelligence knew beforehand of JFK's assassination

On Jan. 1, 1962, more than a year before the assassination, Cubans held
a mock funeral for a still very-much-alive JFK, a reflection of tensions
between Cuba and the United States.

The author
Brian Latell began tracking Cuba for the CIA in the 1960s. Today he does
his Cuba watching from the University of Miami.
By Glenn Garvin
ggarvin@miamiherald.com

The orders surprised the Cuban intelligence officer. Most days in his
tiny communications hut, just outside Fidel Castro's isolated family
compound on the west side of Havana, were spent huddled over his radio
gear, trolling the island's airwaves for the rapid-fire bursts of
signals that were the trademark of CIA spies and saboteurs, pinpointing
their location for security forces.

But now his assignment had abruptly been changed, at least for the day.
"The leadership wants you to stop your CIA work, all your CIA work," his
boss said. Instead, the officer was told he had a new target: Texas,
"any little detail small detail from Texas." And about three hours
later, shortly after mid-day on Nov. 22, 1963, the shocked intelligence
officer had something to report that was much more than a small detail:
the assassination in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy.

"Castro knew," the intelligence officer would tell a CIA debriefer years
later, after defecting to the United States. "They knew Kennedy would be
killed."

The defector's tale is reported in a book to be published next month by
retired CIA analyst Brian Latell, the agency's former national
intelligence officer for Latin America and now a senior research
associate at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban
American Studies.

The book, Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine, is
the first substantial study of Fidel Castro's intelligence operations.
Based on interviews with Cuban spies who defected as well as
declassified documents from the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and other
national security organs, it contains a good deal of material likely to
stir controversy, including accounts of how Castro's spies have carried
out political murders, penetrated the U.S. government and generally
outwitted their American counterparts.

But nothing is more potentially explosive than Latell's claim that
Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, warned Cuban intelligence
officers in advance of his plans to kill the president. Latell writes
that Oswald, a belligerent Castro supporter, grew frustrated when
officials at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City refused to give him a visa
to travel to the island, and promised to shoot Kennedy to prove his
revolutionary credentials.

"Fidel knew of Oswald's intentions — and did nothing to deter the act,"
the book declares.

Even so, Latell maintains his work is sober and even reserved.
"Everything I write is backed up by documents and on-the-record
sources," he told The Miami Herald. "There's virtually no speculation. I
don't say Fidel Castro ordered the assassination, I don't say Oswald was
under his control. He might have been, but I don't argue that, because I
was unable to find any evidence for that.

"But did Fidel want Kennedy dead? Yes. He feared Kennedy. And he knew
Kennedy was gunning for him. In Fidel's mind, he was probably acting in
self-defense."

If Latell's prose is sober, the events it describes are anything but.
Castro's Secrets, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan, explores a
confusing and deadly chapter of the 1960s when the Cold War nearly
turned hot. The United States, fearful that Castro's revolution would
provide the Soviet Union a toehold in the Western Hemisphere, backed a
bloody invasion of anti-communist Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The
Soviets put nuclear missiles in Cuba, which left the entire world
teetering on the brink of war for two weeks.

And even when everyone took a step back, U.S.-supported raids and
sabotage continued in Cuba. The CIA hatched several plots to kill
Castro, using everything from poisoned cigars to exploding sea shells,
and Castro offered chilling hints that he might be planning to respond
in kind. "U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist
plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe," he
told an American reporter in September 1963.

Against that backdrop, suspicions of a Cuban connection to the Kennedy
assassination were only natural. And they were heightened by the erratic
activities of Oswald, a lifelong Marxist who left the Marine Corps in
1959 to defect to the Soviet Union, where he attempted to renounce his
U.S. citizenship and married a Russian woman whose uncle was a colonel
in military intelligence.

By 1963, Oswald had returned to the United States. But just a few months
before Kennedy's death, at a time when tensions between Havana and
Washington simmered only slightly below war temperature, Oswald's
outspoken public support for Cuba — he had staged several one-man
demonstrations and even scuffled with members of an anti-Castro group —
had come to the attention of the news media in New Orleans, where he was
living at the time.

And he had also attracted the attention of the CIA, which had the Mexico
City embassies of Cuba and the Soviet Union under tight surveillance.
The agency spotted Oswald at both embassies on multiple visits between
Sept. 27 and Oct. 2, 1963, as he sought visas to travel to either country.

Those visits — particularly to the Cuban embassy, where Oswald took a
scrapbook of newspaper clippings and other documents to demonstrate his
support for Castro's revolution in hopes of winning a visa — were among
evidence considered by three major federal investigations of the Kennedy
assassination in the 1960s and '70s. All ultimately rejected (though
sometimes only after fierce internal debate) the idea of any causal link
between Castro and the crime.

But Latell's book makes some new revelations and adds detail to older
ones in making the argument that Castro played at least an indirect role
in the assassination. Among them:

• The disclosure by Florentino Aspillaga, the most valuable defector
ever to flee Cuba's DGI intelligence service, that the DGI had asked him
to drop radio surveillance of the CIA hours before the assassination to
focus on signals from Texas. Aspillaga told his CIA debriefers about the
change in surveillance when he defected in 1987, but that information
remained secret until he repeated the story to Latell in interviews for
the book.

• The report of a deeply embedded FBI spy who worked as top-level
international courier for the Communist Party USA that Castro, during a
meeting five months after the assassination, admitted that Oswald had
threatened Kennedy's life during his visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico.

The spy, Jack Childs, who was awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of
Freedom for his quarter-century of spying against Moscow and Havana,
reported to the FBI that Castro told him Oswald "stormed into the
embassy, demanded the visa, and when it was refused to him headed out
saying, "I'm going to kill Kennedy for this!"

• The CIA's now-declassified report of its 1964 debriefing of another
DGI defector, Vladimir Rodriguez Ladera. At the time, Castro was
claiming that Oswald's visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico had been a
minor matter that didn't come to the attention of senior officials in
Havana. "We never in our life heard of him," Castro said in a speech
strongly denying that the Cuban government knew anything about Oswald
beyond what was in the newspapers.

But Rodriguez Ladera, the defector, told the CIA that Castro was surely
lying, because the news of Oswald's arrest set DGI headquarters
instantly abuzz. "It caused much comment concerning the fact that Oswald
had been in the Cuban embassy," he said. And because the embassy in
Mexico City was a major staging ground for Cuban espionage against the
United States as well as the rest of Latin America, Rodriguez Ladera
added, even the most routine matters there were regularly reported
directly to Castro.

• CIA wiretaps and microphones honeycombing the Cuban embassy in Mexico
City captured conversations between DGI officers that showed a
surprisingly detailed knowledge of Oswald's background in the first
hours after the assassination, when relatively little of it had been
reported in the press.

At the center of the chatter was Luisa Calderon, a pretty,
English-speaking DGI officer in her early 20s who had lived in Miami
with her parents throughout the 1950s. Barely four hours after the
assassination, she got a phone call from a man, also apparently a DGI
spy. He asked if she knew what had happened in Dallas. "Yes, of course,"
she answered. "I knew of it almost before Kennedy did." Her caller
continued to chatter away, noting correctly that Oswald spoke Russian
and had written to Castro offering to join his fighting forces in 1959.
Latell believes the speed and depth of those comments show that the DGI
maintained a file on Oswald and was well acquainted with him.

The wiretaps also demonstrate something about the way Cuban intelligence
officers regarded Kennedy. "Wonderful! What good news!" Calderon said to
another caller who mentioned the assassination, before breaking into
laughter at the news — untrue, as it would turn out — that Kennedy's
wife and brother had also been wounded. "He was a family man, yes, but
also a degenerate aggressor," Calderon added, to which her caller
exclaimed, "Three shots in the face!" Replied Calderon: "Perfect!"

• In what may be the most intriguing element of his book, Latell
concludes that Rolando Cubela, a high-ranking Cuban official recruited
by the CIA to assassinate Castro — an act the agency hoped would trigger
a military rebellion — was actually a double agent, feeding every detail
of U.S. plans back to Havana. Castro's knowledge that his own murder was
being plotted by the highest level of the American government, Latell
writes, is what led to his "conspiracy of silence" about Oswald's
assassination plan.

"Fidel Castro was running the most important double agent operation in
the history of intelligence," Latell said. "He wanted definitive proof
that Kennedy was trying to kill him. And he got it." In a brutal irony,
the CIA was delivering to Cubela a poison-tipped ballpoint pen with
which to kill Castro at the very moment that Oswald was shooting Kennedy.

Two major pieces of evidence implicate Cubela as a double agent, Latell
writes. One was a recently declassified lie-detector test administered
to Cubela's best friend and frequent co-conspirator in CIA adventures,
the late Coral Gables jeweler Carlos Tepedino. Tepedino, during a
confrontational interrogation by CIA handlers in 1965, confessed that
Cubela was still "cooperating'' with Cuban intelligence and had never
tried to organize a military revolt against Castro.

Tepedino's story was more than confirmed, Latell writes, by
conversations with another DGI defector: Miguel Mir, a high official in
Castro's personal security office from 1986 to 1992. Mir said he had
read files identifying Cubela as a double agent under DGI control.

Mercurial and enigmatic, Cubela was one of the military heroes of the
Cuban revolution, the man who actually captured the presidential palace
in Havana. But soon afterward he began talking loosely about his
dissatisfaction with Castro's political direction. By 1961 he was
meeting clandestinely with the CIA; by 1962 he was a trusted recruit,
regarded by the CIA as its best agent inside Castro's government.

But, Latell writes, Cubela's recruitment by the CIA practically dripped
with question marks right from the beginning. He seemed to have
unlimited time and money to travel, meeting with CIA officers on four
different continents. He refused to take a lie-detector test — a
standard procedure for new recruits — or report any significant
information about what was going on inside Castro's government. Instead,
he constantly proposed "violent action," as one of his CIA handlers
noted in a report, including the assassination of Castro.

That did not exactly clash with the CIA's own plans. By early 1963, the
agency was under serious pressure from the Kennedy administration to
"come up with some ideas to kill Castro," as one CIA official would
later testify in a congressional hearing. In October, the agency began
circulating a document to the top national security officials in
Washington stamped TOP SECRET-SENSITIVE with the title A Contingency
Plan for a Coup in Cuba. It said Cubela and his military co-conspirators
would "neutralize" Castro and "the top echelon of the Cuban leadership,"
then proclaim a new pro-American government that would — if necessary —
ask for U.S. military assistance to put down any resistance. "Nothing in
the plan allowed for Fidel's capture alive," Latell writes.

When Cubela heard of the plan and his role in it, he was enthusiastic.
But he insisted on a meeting with Robert Kennedy, the president's
brother and point-man on Cuba, for assurances that the plan had
presidential blessing. Desmond FitzGerald, a top CIA official and close
friend of Robert Kennedy, flew to Paris to meet Cubela and reassure him.
The CIA also got President Kennedy to insert a chunk of extraordinarily
militant rhetoric — a virtual endorsement of a military coup — into a
speech on Cuba delivered in Miami Beach just four days before the
president's death.

The CIA called off its plan for the Cuban coup after Kennedy's
assassination, and new President Lyndon Johnson rapidly de-escalated the
covert U.S. war against Castro — though Cubela, for another two years,
continued pressing both the CIA and militant Cuban exile groups in Miami
for help in killing Castro. Most of the CIA officials who oversaw
Cubela's involvement with their agency insisted until they died that he
had genuinely turned against Castro.

Cubela was arrested in Havana in 1966 and tried for plotting to murder
Castro. But during his trial, prosecutors never mentioned the CIA or the
poison-tipped pen, accusing him instead of collaborating with Miami
exiles. He was convicted and sentenced to death — but the sentence was
commuted to a prison term at Castro's request. He served 12 years as the
prison's doctor, living in comfortable quarters, and was often seen
outside, driving the streets. Nearly 80, Cubela reportedly divides his
time between Spain and South Florida. Attempts by the Miami Herald to
reach him through family members were unsuccessful.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/17/v-fullstory/2700186/the-kennedy-assassination-did.html