Brian Latell: Was Castro involved in JFK's death?
[Brian Latell is a senior research associate and adjunct professor at the University of Miami. A career Latin America specialist for the CIA and National Intelligence Council, he served as National Intelligence Officer for Latin America from 1990-1994. He is the author of After Fidel.]
Fidel Castro looms large in fewer than a dozen books among the hundreds written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two of them are the work of irrepressible conspiracy theorist and researcher Gus Russo. In his 1998 book, Live by the Sword, and now in Brothers in Arms, written with Stephen Molton, Russo labors to implicate Castro in the murder in Dallas.[1]
It is not an unreasonable postulation. No one had more compelling motive to eliminate the president than the Cuban leader who had known of CIA and White House plots against his life since at least 1961. His regime was the target of unrelenting American assaults—sabotage operations, assassination plots, support for guerrillas, and encouragement of military coup plotters—that began with the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, persisted after the missile crisis in October 1962, and lasted the entirety of the Kennedy administration.
On the receiving end, Castro had no illusions about the source of all this or how determined his enemies were to annihilate his revolution. He feared Kennedy and had every reason to plot against him in a similar fashion. In early September, 1963, during an impromptu press conference in Havana, Castro even warned the Kennedy administration that “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”[2] Never one to issue idle threats, or to let enemies conspire against him with impunity, Fidel, at a minimum, must have considered retaliation in kind.[3]
By the early 1960s, Castro was amply experienced in plotting and ordering assassinations of adversaries. As a university student in the late 1940s, he was implicated in three or four attempts, once even seriously proposing the murder of Cuba’s president during a visit with other students to the presidential residence.[4] As a revolutionary in Mexico in 1956 he ordered his brother Raúl to execute a Cuban who was no longer trusted. Once in power in 1959, Fidel ordered many other executions and murders of foes at home and abroad. And by late 1963, as the conspiratorial czar of Cuban intelligence, he had built up one of the world’s most proficient and lethal covert capabilities.
These capacities encompassed all manner of medidas activas (active measures), including sophisticated disinformation campaigns devised to point the finger of suspicion for Kennedy’s death anywhere but toward Havana. Within a few days of the assassination, Castro went to his speaker’s platform and launched a propaganda campaign to suggest that right-wing conspirators, probably linked to the CIA, were really responsible. Later, two international conferences sponsored by Cuban intelligence pushed the same exculpatory line. Indeed, to this day the Castro regime is responsible for a ceaseless stream of books, feature articles in the controlled-Cuban press, and other publications that have one thing in common: they all attempt to pin the Kennedy assassination on a right-wing conspiracy.[5]
But explaining away Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuban connections has not been easy for Cuban intelligence. As an impressionable young Marine in California in 1958, he fantasized about going AWOL to join Castro’s guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. He hung Fidel’s picture on the wall of his apartment in New Orleans. He mused about naming his unborn first child Fidel. The alias he used when he bought the assassination rifle (A. Hidell) rhymed with Fidel. He tried to talk his wife Marina into helping him hijack a plane to Cuba so he could fight for “Uncle Fidel.” He read copious amounts of print propaganda about his idol and was adept at repeating it.
His infatuation with Cuba’s experience filled him with hope and loathing, the hope to fight for Cuban causes and the loathing of Fidel’s enemies. Inspired by the unabashed violence of Castro’s revolution, Oswald took up arms himself, nearly succeeding in a murder attempt on a retired right-wing American general, Edwin A. Walker. The famous photo of Oswald dressed in black, armed with rifle and pistol, and clutching copies of Marxist magazines, probably was intended to impress Cuban officials he hoped would welcome him as a comrade-in-arms.
And, of course, there was his activism as a one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, an adoring pro-Castro radio performance there, and his week-long, still mysterious, sojourn to Mexico City where he lobbied at Castro’s embassy for approval to migrate to Cuba. According to Fidel himself, as reported by an American communist who actually was a trusted FBI informant, Oswald left the embassy in late September 1963 bitterly disappointed because Cuba refused to grant him a visa. He allegedly said that he would kill Kennedy in retaliation.[6]
Earlier writers—notably Alfred H. Newman in 1970 and Jean Davison in 1983—were impressed with the evidence of Oswald’s Cuba obsession and managed to offer what the Warren Commission had omitted.[7] They demonstrated convincingly that Oswald was motivated to kill Kennedy because of his attraction to the Cuban revolution and hatred of Castro’s enemies. But that is where they and other scrupulous researchers have always had to stop when considering the lethal corollary of that judgment: the possibility of active Cuban government involvement with Oswald in the period leading up to the assassination.
Two congressional investigations in the 1970s looked for possible linkages but found little new. There was certainly no smoking gun. Expanding on the 1975-76 investigation by the Church Committee in the Senate, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that the Cuban government was not involved. Subsequently, in the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) spent years making sure that all relevant CIA and other US government records were declassified and open to the public. Not a single document from that mountain of paper has implicated Havana in any novel or persuasive way.
The absence of a last, critical link is not altogether surprising. Given the skill and discipline of Cuban intelligence (particularly in compartmenting its most sensitive operations) it has always seemed unlikely that documentary evidence, or reliable testimony by former Cuban operatives, would materialize to connect Oswald, Cuban spy services, and Fidel Castro to Kennedy’s assassination. Fidel, after all, would do everything possible to be sure nothing survived that could possibly implicate him.
Missing Dots
Yet this is the central concoction of Russo and Molton in Brothers in Arms. In their words, Oswald “did it with the aid and comfort of Fidel and Raúl Castro.”[8] Russo, of course, has worked the thesis before, repeatedly trying, but failing, to demonstrate that Havana was somehow responsible for what happened in Dallas. The proposition was evident in his earlier book, Live by the Sword, and even more so in the German and English-language documentary, Rendezvous mit dem Tod (Rendezvous with Death), that Russo produced in 2006 with Wilfried Huismann. Now, with co-author Molton, Russo presents the culmination of his decades-long quest, only to fall short again. What is claimed to be definitive evidence of a Cuban intelligence connection to Oswald simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
Numerous factual errors undermine a reader’s confidence in the authors’ case long before they finish making it. For example, Adolf A. Berle, Jr. was never Kennedy’s assistant secretary of State for Latin America (four others rotated in and out of that post), though Berle was an influential adviser. A Cuban peasant named Eutimio Guerra did conspire against Fidel and was captured and executed, but not in the time frame or manner described in the book. Ion Mihai Pacepa was a Romanian intelligence officer, not “one of the highest-ranking KGB officers ever to defect.”[9]
Fidel did not “[lead] a unit of the Cuban Army” to attack and seize a Soviet surface-to-air missile base in eastern Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis.[10] He was at the opposite end of the island. And Bill Harvey, the legendary CIA officer of Berlin tunnel fame and assassination operations against Castro, did not have a frequently reported conversation with President Kennedy, who was supposed to have said to him, “So you are our James Bond?” Asked under oath during testimony before the Church Committee if that old canard was true, Harvey said, “Absolutely not.”[11]
More central to the book’s main argument, Raúl Castro was not in charge of Cuban intelligence—neither the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI, or General Directorate of Intelligence, responsible for foreign intelligence), nor the Dirección de Seguridad del Estado (DSE, or Department of State Security, responsible for internal security) in the early 1960s. Both were under the command of the Minister of Interior, Raúl’s most powerful rival then and in later years. Raúl did not get control of Cuban intelligence until 1989, when he had his crony Abelardo Colomé Ibarra installed as Minister of Interior. But even then, Raúl played second fiddle to Fidel, Cuba’s inveterate spymaster and all-powerful overseer of clandestine operations.
Raúl ran the Cuban revolutionary armed forces (not the “Red Army”) beginning in October 1959, and, as he recently boasted, was history’s longest-serving defense minister when he finally gave the portfolio to another crony in February 2008. Running the military was an enormous, demanding responsibility that allowed him no time to dabble in foreign intelligence.
His ministry, to be sure, housed important counterintelligence components and trained foreign guerrilla recruits. But once Raúl took over the management of the military, Fidel relied on other men to run intelligence operations. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, however, was never a key adviser on intelligence matters once Castro seized power. And Guevara never ran the Ministry of Interior either, as Russo and Molton believe. Fidel did not trust him sufficiently to delegate such exceptional power. And that ministry never controlled the Cuban government “for all intents and purposes” as the authors claim.[12]
The authors’ misunderstanding of Raúl’s historic role is perhaps a necessary contrivance because the premise of the book is that the four Castro and Kennedy brothers were all jousting in secret and lethal intelligence wars across the Florida Straits. But Raúl, in reality, was a minor player in such activity. Probably misunderstanding After Fidel, my biographical study of Raúl, who has indeed been an indispensable partner with Fidel for more than five decades, the authors exaggerate my findings.
They write, for example, that when Fidel wavered in his ideological commitments in the early years of their regime, Raúl “reeled him back in,” and similarly, that Fidel fell into ideological “line with Raúl and Che.”[13] The reality, though, is that Fidel has always been the dominant, controlling brother, at least until recently. He and Raúl had no doctrinal disagreements in those years, only conflicting views about how and when to assert their Marxist convictions....
Read entire article at WashingtonDecoded (website run by Max Holland)
Fidel Castro looms large in fewer than a dozen books among the hundreds written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two of them are the work of irrepressible conspiracy theorist and researcher Gus Russo. In his 1998 book, Live by the Sword, and now in Brothers in Arms, written with Stephen Molton, Russo labors to implicate Castro in the murder in Dallas.[1]
It is not an unreasonable postulation. No one had more compelling motive to eliminate the president than the Cuban leader who had known of CIA and White House plots against his life since at least 1961. His regime was the target of unrelenting American assaults—sabotage operations, assassination plots, support for guerrillas, and encouragement of military coup plotters—that began with the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, persisted after the missile crisis in October 1962, and lasted the entirety of the Kennedy administration.
On the receiving end, Castro had no illusions about the source of all this or how determined his enemies were to annihilate his revolution. He feared Kennedy and had every reason to plot against him in a similar fashion. In early September, 1963, during an impromptu press conference in Havana, Castro even warned the Kennedy administration that “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”[2] Never one to issue idle threats, or to let enemies conspire against him with impunity, Fidel, at a minimum, must have considered retaliation in kind.[3]
By the early 1960s, Castro was amply experienced in plotting and ordering assassinations of adversaries. As a university student in the late 1940s, he was implicated in three or four attempts, once even seriously proposing the murder of Cuba’s president during a visit with other students to the presidential residence.[4] As a revolutionary in Mexico in 1956 he ordered his brother Raúl to execute a Cuban who was no longer trusted. Once in power in 1959, Fidel ordered many other executions and murders of foes at home and abroad. And by late 1963, as the conspiratorial czar of Cuban intelligence, he had built up one of the world’s most proficient and lethal covert capabilities.
These capacities encompassed all manner of medidas activas (active measures), including sophisticated disinformation campaigns devised to point the finger of suspicion for Kennedy’s death anywhere but toward Havana. Within a few days of the assassination, Castro went to his speaker’s platform and launched a propaganda campaign to suggest that right-wing conspirators, probably linked to the CIA, were really responsible. Later, two international conferences sponsored by Cuban intelligence pushed the same exculpatory line. Indeed, to this day the Castro regime is responsible for a ceaseless stream of books, feature articles in the controlled-Cuban press, and other publications that have one thing in common: they all attempt to pin the Kennedy assassination on a right-wing conspiracy.[5]
But explaining away Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuban connections has not been easy for Cuban intelligence. As an impressionable young Marine in California in 1958, he fantasized about going AWOL to join Castro’s guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. He hung Fidel’s picture on the wall of his apartment in New Orleans. He mused about naming his unborn first child Fidel. The alias he used when he bought the assassination rifle (A. Hidell) rhymed with Fidel. He tried to talk his wife Marina into helping him hijack a plane to Cuba so he could fight for “Uncle Fidel.” He read copious amounts of print propaganda about his idol and was adept at repeating it.
His infatuation with Cuba’s experience filled him with hope and loathing, the hope to fight for Cuban causes and the loathing of Fidel’s enemies. Inspired by the unabashed violence of Castro’s revolution, Oswald took up arms himself, nearly succeeding in a murder attempt on a retired right-wing American general, Edwin A. Walker. The famous photo of Oswald dressed in black, armed with rifle and pistol, and clutching copies of Marxist magazines, probably was intended to impress Cuban officials he hoped would welcome him as a comrade-in-arms.
And, of course, there was his activism as a one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, an adoring pro-Castro radio performance there, and his week-long, still mysterious, sojourn to Mexico City where he lobbied at Castro’s embassy for approval to migrate to Cuba. According to Fidel himself, as reported by an American communist who actually was a trusted FBI informant, Oswald left the embassy in late September 1963 bitterly disappointed because Cuba refused to grant him a visa. He allegedly said that he would kill Kennedy in retaliation.[6]
Earlier writers—notably Alfred H. Newman in 1970 and Jean Davison in 1983—were impressed with the evidence of Oswald’s Cuba obsession and managed to offer what the Warren Commission had omitted.[7] They demonstrated convincingly that Oswald was motivated to kill Kennedy because of his attraction to the Cuban revolution and hatred of Castro’s enemies. But that is where they and other scrupulous researchers have always had to stop when considering the lethal corollary of that judgment: the possibility of active Cuban government involvement with Oswald in the period leading up to the assassination.
Two congressional investigations in the 1970s looked for possible linkages but found little new. There was certainly no smoking gun. Expanding on the 1975-76 investigation by the Church Committee in the Senate, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that the Cuban government was not involved. Subsequently, in the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) spent years making sure that all relevant CIA and other US government records were declassified and open to the public. Not a single document from that mountain of paper has implicated Havana in any novel or persuasive way.
The absence of a last, critical link is not altogether surprising. Given the skill and discipline of Cuban intelligence (particularly in compartmenting its most sensitive operations) it has always seemed unlikely that documentary evidence, or reliable testimony by former Cuban operatives, would materialize to connect Oswald, Cuban spy services, and Fidel Castro to Kennedy’s assassination. Fidel, after all, would do everything possible to be sure nothing survived that could possibly implicate him.
Missing Dots
Yet this is the central concoction of Russo and Molton in Brothers in Arms. In their words, Oswald “did it with the aid and comfort of Fidel and Raúl Castro.”[8] Russo, of course, has worked the thesis before, repeatedly trying, but failing, to demonstrate that Havana was somehow responsible for what happened in Dallas. The proposition was evident in his earlier book, Live by the Sword, and even more so in the German and English-language documentary, Rendezvous mit dem Tod (Rendezvous with Death), that Russo produced in 2006 with Wilfried Huismann. Now, with co-author Molton, Russo presents the culmination of his decades-long quest, only to fall short again. What is claimed to be definitive evidence of a Cuban intelligence connection to Oswald simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
Numerous factual errors undermine a reader’s confidence in the authors’ case long before they finish making it. For example, Adolf A. Berle, Jr. was never Kennedy’s assistant secretary of State for Latin America (four others rotated in and out of that post), though Berle was an influential adviser. A Cuban peasant named Eutimio Guerra did conspire against Fidel and was captured and executed, but not in the time frame or manner described in the book. Ion Mihai Pacepa was a Romanian intelligence officer, not “one of the highest-ranking KGB officers ever to defect.”[9]
Fidel did not “[lead] a unit of the Cuban Army” to attack and seize a Soviet surface-to-air missile base in eastern Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis.[10] He was at the opposite end of the island. And Bill Harvey, the legendary CIA officer of Berlin tunnel fame and assassination operations against Castro, did not have a frequently reported conversation with President Kennedy, who was supposed to have said to him, “So you are our James Bond?” Asked under oath during testimony before the Church Committee if that old canard was true, Harvey said, “Absolutely not.”[11]
More central to the book’s main argument, Raúl Castro was not in charge of Cuban intelligence—neither the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI, or General Directorate of Intelligence, responsible for foreign intelligence), nor the Dirección de Seguridad del Estado (DSE, or Department of State Security, responsible for internal security) in the early 1960s. Both were under the command of the Minister of Interior, Raúl’s most powerful rival then and in later years. Raúl did not get control of Cuban intelligence until 1989, when he had his crony Abelardo Colomé Ibarra installed as Minister of Interior. But even then, Raúl played second fiddle to Fidel, Cuba’s inveterate spymaster and all-powerful overseer of clandestine operations.
Raúl ran the Cuban revolutionary armed forces (not the “Red Army”) beginning in October 1959, and, as he recently boasted, was history’s longest-serving defense minister when he finally gave the portfolio to another crony in February 2008. Running the military was an enormous, demanding responsibility that allowed him no time to dabble in foreign intelligence.
His ministry, to be sure, housed important counterintelligence components and trained foreign guerrilla recruits. But once Raúl took over the management of the military, Fidel relied on other men to run intelligence operations. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, however, was never a key adviser on intelligence matters once Castro seized power. And Guevara never ran the Ministry of Interior either, as Russo and Molton believe. Fidel did not trust him sufficiently to delegate such exceptional power. And that ministry never controlled the Cuban government “for all intents and purposes” as the authors claim.[12]
The authors’ misunderstanding of Raúl’s historic role is perhaps a necessary contrivance because the premise of the book is that the four Castro and Kennedy brothers were all jousting in secret and lethal intelligence wars across the Florida Straits. But Raúl, in reality, was a minor player in such activity. Probably misunderstanding After Fidel, my biographical study of Raúl, who has indeed been an indispensable partner with Fidel for more than five decades, the authors exaggerate my findings.
They write, for example, that when Fidel wavered in his ideological commitments in the early years of their regime, Raúl “reeled him back in,” and similarly, that Fidel fell into ideological “line with Raúl and Che.”[13] The reality, though, is that Fidel has always been the dominant, controlling brother, at least until recently. He and Raúl had no doctrinal disagreements in those years, only conflicting views about how and when to assert their Marxist convictions....