JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (23 page)

Based on recently declassified Kennedy administration documents, National Security Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh has concluded in a little-noted article that “in 1963 John Kennedy began pursuing an alternative script on Cuba: a secret dialogue toward an actual rapprochement with Castro.”
[2]
The documents Kornbluh discovered have confirmed and filled in a story that Cuban and American diplomats have been telling for decades.

In the fall of 1962, New York lawyer James Donovan secretly represented John and Robert Kennedy in negotiations with Fidel Castro for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, so they could return to their families in Miami and elsewhere. In that process, which proved successful, a human encounter overcame politics. Donovan and Castro became friends. On Donovan’s January 1963 follow-up trip to Cuba, Rene Vallejo, Castro’s aide and physician, raised a new possibility that Donovan reported to U.S. intelligence officials. As Donovan was about to board his plane to return to the United States, Vallejo “broached the subject of re-establishing diplomatic relations with the U.S.” and invited Donovan to return for talks “about the future of Cuba and international relations in general.”
[3]

In March 1963, John Kennedy took careful note of this development and tried to smooth the way for further dialogue with Fidel Castro. On the eve of another Donovan trip to Havana, the president overruled a State Department recommendation for Donovan’s talks with Castro that would have raised a major obstacle in a new Cuban–American relationship. In a March 4, 1963, Top Secret/Eyes Only memorandum, Gordon Chase, deputy to the National Security Adviser, stated Kennedy’s more open position toward Castro: “The President does not agree that we should make the breaking of Sino/Soviet ties a non-negotiable point. We don’t want to present Castro with a condition that he obviously cannot fulfill. We should start thinking along more flexible lines.”

The memorandum went on to emphasize both secrecy and Kennedy’s keen attention to what was opening up with Cuba: “The above must be kept close to the vest. The President, himself, is very interested in this one.”
[4]

JFK was ahead of RFK on Cuba. In a March 14 memorandum, Robert Kennedy unsuccessfully urged the president to move against Castro: “I would not like it said a year from now that we could have had this internal breakup in Cuba but we just did not set the stage for it.”
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Robert apparently received no response from his brother, as he wrote him again on March 26 in frustration: “Do you think there was any merit to my last memo? . . . In any case, is there anything further on this matter?”
[6]

While John Kennedy was responding to his brother’s anti-Castro schemes with silence, he was himself turning toward a new approach to Fidel. Although he would not forsake all U.S. efforts to subvert Cuba, before the month was over President Kennedy made a policy decision that in effect signaled his own opening toward Castro. It pitted him against the CIA once again. He was provoked into it by the Agency.

On March 19, the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile group Alpha 66 announced at a Washington press conference that it had raided a Soviet “fortress” and ship in Cuba, causing a dozen casualties and serious damage.
[7]
Alpha 66 was one of the commando teams maintained by the giant CIA station in Miami, “JM/WAVE,” for its attacks on Cuba. Alpha 66 exile leader Antonio Veciana would admit years later to Gaeton Fonzi, a federal investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), that the purpose of the CIA-initiated attack on the Soviet vessel in Cuban waters was “to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro.”
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Veciana’s CIA adviser was a man who used the cover name “Maurice Bishop.” Veciana revealed that “[Bishop] kept saying Kennedy would have to be forced to make a decision, and the only way was to put him up against the wall.”
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So Bishop targeted Soviet ships to create another Soviet–American crisis. As Fonzi showed by his HSCA investigation, “Maurice Bishop” was in fact David Atlee Phillips, who would become a key player in John Kennedy’s assassination and would subsequently be promoted to chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division.
[10]

“Maurice Bishop”/David Phillips carefully kept his distance from the Washington press conference that he had set up to publicize the Alpha 66 attack. However, he arranged for high-ranking officials in the Departments of Health and Agriculture to attend it, thus giving the event legitimacy and prominent coverage in the next day’s
New York Times
.
[11]

The Alpha 66 raid was only the beginning. It was followed up eight days later by another Cuban exile attack that damaged a Soviet freighter in a Cuban port.
[12]
The JM/WAVE chief of operations coordinating these efforts to force Kennedy’s hand against Castro was the CIA’s David Sanchez Morales, a longtime co-worker of David Atlee Phillips. Morales would also participate in JFK’s murder, as he would admit to friends in the 1970s.
[13]

The Cuban exile attacks prompted a Soviet protest to Washington. Khrushchev naturally held Kennedy responsible for refugee gunboats that the CIA was running out of Miami. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin met with Robert Kennedy, and RFK reported Dobrynin’s complaint to JFK: “It isn’t possible [for him] to believe that if we really wanted to stop these raids that we could not do so.”
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The CIA’s tactic was forcing the president to choose between the militant Cold War politics of a Miami exile community manipulated by the CIA and the almost indefinable politics that JFK was developing with Nikita Khrushchev. He chose the latter.

As in the CIA’s Bay of Pigs plot to trap Kennedy, its Alpha 66 ploy backfired. Instead of backing Alpha 66, President Kennedy ordered a government crackdown on all Miami exile raids into Cuba. In doing so, he enlisted the help of his brother.

On March 31, Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department took its first step in implementing a policy of preventing Cuban refugees from using U.S. territory to organize or launch raids against Cuba. The Justice Department ordered eighteen Cubans in the Miami area, who were already involved in raids, to confine their movements to Dade County (or in some cases, the U.S.), under the threat of arrest or deportation. One of them was Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana.
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Within a week, the Coast Guard in Florida, working in concert with British officials in the Bahamas, seized a series of Cuban rebel boats and arrested their commando groups before they could attack Soviet ships near Cuba.

The initial arrests and boat confiscations resulted in confusing news reports that mirrored the internal government conflict between Kennedy and the CIA. The owner of one of the confiscated boats, Alexander I. Rorke, Jr., told the
New York Times
that “the United States Government, through the Central Intelligence Agency, had had advance knowledge of the trips” of his boat, the
Violin III
, into Cuban waters.
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Rorke also said that “the C.I.A. had financed trips of the Violin III.” He added that his boat, if released, “would be used in future Cuban operations.”
[17]

In response to the exiles’ determination to continue the attacks, the president increased his efforts to stop them. Under an April 6 headline, “U.S. Strengthens Check on Raiders,” the
Times
reported:

“The United States is throwing more planes, ships, and men into its effort to police the straits of Florida against anti-Castro raiders operating from this country.

“Coast Guard headquarters announced today that it had ordered six more planes and 12 more boats into the Seventh District to reinforce the patrols already assigned to the Florida-Puerto Rico area.

“. . . The action followed the Government’s announcement last weekend that it intended to ‘take every step necessary’ to halt commando raids from United States territory against Cuba and Soviet ships bound for Cuba.”
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By enforcing President Kennedy’s new policy, the Justice Department and the Coast Guard were restraining a covert arm of the CIA from drawing the United States into a war with Cuba. Premier Fidel Castro responded with evident surprise by saying that Kennedy’s curtailment of the hit-and-run raids was “a step forward toward reduction of the dangers of crisis and war.”
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However, as the
Times
reported on April 10, the Florida refugee groups subsidized by the CIA exploded with bitterness, charging the Kennedy administration with engaging in “coexistence” with the Castro regime.
[20]

While U.S. and British forces continued to round up anti-Castro rebels and boats, Dr. Jose Miro Cardona, head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) in Miami, resigned in protest to the shift in U.S. policy. The Cuban Revolutionary Council had been created by the U.S. government prior to the Bay of Pigs as a provisional Cuban government to seize power when Castro was overthrown. It also served as an umbrella organization for the variety of Miami exile groups. The CRC’s budget and funding came from the CIA. In the wake of Cardona’s resignation, a spokesperson for the Cuban Revolutionary Council stated that the organization received “only” $972,000 a year (rather than $2,000,000 as previously reported) “and this sum is not even distributed by the council but by the Central Intelligence Agency with the help of a public accounting firm.”
[21]

In his April 18 resignation statement, which the
New York Times
headlined as an “Attack on Kennedy,”
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Miro Cardona said, “American Government policy has shifted suddenly, violently, and unexpectedly—as dangerously and without warning as on that other sad occasion [the Bay of Pigs], with no more reasonable explanation than Russia’s note protesting the breaking of an agreement [Kennedy’s agreement with Khrushchev, in exchange for the Soviet missiles’ removal, that the U.S. would not invade Cuba].” Cardona concluded from the confinement of Cuban exile raiders and the immobilization of their boats that “the struggle for Cuba was in the process of being liquidated by the Government. This conclusion,” he felt, “appears to be confirmed, strongly confirmed, with the announcement that every refugee has received his last allotment this month, forcing them to relocate.”
[23]

With rebel raiders under arrest and government funding for the exile army suddenly drying up, forcing them to disperse, Cardona saw the handwriting on the wall and the initials beneath it: JFK. The Florida exile community united behind Cardona and against JFK, whom they now saw as an ally of Castro. They mourned the president’s turnaround as a virtual death to their political vision. As the Associated Press reported on April 18 from Miami, “The dispute between the Cuban exile leaders and the Kennedy administration was symbolized here today by black crepe hung from the doors of exiles’ homes.”
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Kennedy wrote Khrushchev secretly on April 11, 1963, explaining to his Cold War counterpart a policy chosen partly on Khrushchev’s behalf that was already beginning to cost Kennedy dearly. The U.S. president said he was “aware of the tensions unduly created by recent private attacks on your ships in Caribbean waters; and we are taking action to halt those attacks which are in violation of our laws, and obtaining the support of the British Government in preventing the use of their Caribbean islands for this purpose. The efforts of this Government to reduce tensions have, as you know, aroused much criticism from certain quarters in this country. But neither such criticism nor the opposition of any sector of our society will be allowed to determine the policies of this Government. In particular, I have neither the intention nor the desire to invade Cuba . . .”
[25]

In early April, James Donovan returned to Cuba to negotiate the release of more prisoners. In the meantime, the CIA had been at work on a plan to assassinate Castro, through his negotiating friend, Donovan. The top secret 1967 Inspector General’s
Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro
described the scheme: “At about the time of the Donovan-Castro negotiations for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners a plan was devised to have Donovan present a contaminated skin diving suit to Castro as a gift . . . According to Sidney Gottlieb [head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division], this scheme progressed to the point of actually buying a diving suit and readying it for delivery. The technique involved dusting the inside of the suit with a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin disease (Madura foot) and contaminating the breathing apparatus with tubercle bacilli.”
[26]

CIA executive Sam Halpern, who was in on the scheme, later recalled, “The plan was abandoned because it was overtaken by events: Donovan had already given Castro a skin diving suit on his own initiative.”
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By trying to use negotiator Donovan as an unwitting instrument for Castro’s murder, the CIA knew it was also setting up the authority Donovan represented, President Kennedy, who would have been blamed for the Cuban premier’s easily traceable death. Thus the intended demise of three targets: Castro’s life, Kennedy’s credibility, and the hope of a Cuban–American dialogue. The aborted scenario was an odd foreshadowing of the scapegoating process in JFK’s murder, in which a CIA-created trail would lead visibly from the victim, through Oswald, toward Castro, effectively destroying through Dallas any possible Cuban–American rapprochement. Nor was the CIA’s Donovan-Castro plot without high-level authority. The Inspector General’s report noted explicitly that among “those who were involved in the plot or who were identified to us by the participants as being witting” was Richard Helms, then covert-action chief.
[28]
By 1967 when the report was written on the CIA’s plots to kill Castro, Helms had become the director of Central Intelligence.