JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (25 page)

Oswald seems to have been working with both the CIA and the FBI. For the CIA, he was acting as a provocateur, subverting the public image of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As we shall see, Oswald was also being drawn into the plot to kill the president, in which his activities as a pro-Castro demonstrator were preparing the ground for his role as the assassination scapegoat. At the same time, Oswald was apparently an FBI informant. As we learn more about Lee Harvey Oswald, we will have to consider the possibility that the information he was giving the FBI may have actually been an attempt to stop the killing of the president.

Six days after his release from jail, Oswald was back on the streets passing out more pro-Castro leaflets. This time he succeeded in gaining wider media attention, to the increasing detriment of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. His leafleting was carried on the TV news, and he was interviewed by local radio commentator William Stuckey, who probed into his personal background. Oswald presented a Marine Corps past in which he “served honorably,” omitting his later betrayal to the Soviet Union and his undesirable discharge—thereby setting himself up to be exposed as a turncoat. He accepted Stuckey’s invitation to take part in a radio debate against his presumed antagonist, Carlos Bringuier, and Bringuier’s ally Ed Butler, a CIA asset who was head of the stridently anti-communist Information Council of the Americas (INCA). According to a CIA memorandum that is now in the National Archives, “Butler, Staff Director of INCA, is a contact of our New Orleans Office and the source of numerous reports.”
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The radio debate on August 21 quickly became an expose of Oswald’s history with Soviet Communism. William Stuckey had been primed earlier that day, he said to the Warren Commission, both by an unidentified “news source” and by Ed Butler, about Oswald’s past in Russia.
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Stuckey said he conferred with Butler, and “we agreed together to produce this information on the program that night.”
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As the debate began, Stuckey therefore introduced Oswald by citing newspaper clippings showing he had tried to renounce his American citizenship to become a Soviet citizen in 1959 and had remained in the Soviet Union for three years.
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Bringuier and Butler then peppered Oswald with questions about the FPCC as a communist front and Cuba as a Soviet satellite. Oswald responded to the coordinated ambush with as cool a response as he had given Bringuier on the street. He calmly acknowledged his expatriate history in the U.S.S.R., then added his own touch to the discrediting of the FPCC by repeatedly bringing up its investigations by the federal government, protesting perhaps too much that nothing incriminating had been found.
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The “debate” succeeded in thoroughly identifying Oswald’s FPCC chapter with his treasonous past. With this public relations disaster, his whirlwind New Orleans campaign had ended. He had not only succeeded in thoroughly discrediting the FPCC in New Orleans. After John Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald’s public association with the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee would demolish what little there was left of it.
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More important, Oswald’s pro-Castro masquerade in New Orleans would be used later to introduce Fidel Castro into the background of John Kennedy’s murder. Through Oswald, whose Cuban connection would be further dramatized in the days ahead, Castro could become the larger assassination scapegoat, thereby justifying an invasion of Cuba in retaliation for its apparent murder of a president who had pledged personally not to invade Cuba.

John Kennedy’s turn toward peace was not without reversals and compromises. On June 19, 1963, President Kennedy succumbed to Cold War pressures and stepped backward. He approved a CIA program of sabotage and harassment against targets in Cuba that included electric power, transportation, oil, and manufacturing facilities.
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Kennedy was responding both to mounting demands in his own administration for increasing pressure on Castro and to the appearance of a more aggressive Cuban government policy of exporting revolution to other Latin American countries. While adhering to his promise to Khrushchev not to launch a U.S. invasion of Cuba, Kennedy nevertheless agreed to a modified version of the covert-action campaign against Cuba that he had endorsed as Operation Mongoose in November 1961. Only nine days after his American University address, Kennedy had ratified a CIA program contradicting it.

Kennedy’s regression can be understood in the political context of the time. He was, after all, an American politician, and the Cold War was far from over. For the remaining five months of his life, John Kennedy continued a policy of sabotage against Cuba that he may have seen as a bone thrown to his barking CIA and military advisers but was in any case a crime against international law. It was also a violation of the international trust that he and Nikita Khrushchev had envisioned and increasingly fostered since the missile crisis. Right up to his death, Kennedy remained in some ways a Cold Warrior, in conflict with his own soaring vision in the American University address. What is remarkable, however, is not that Kennedy compromised that vision and continued to support the subversion of the Cuban government in 1963, but that beneath that given political reality of his day he secretly explored a different possibility with Fidel Castro. He did so with an increasingly open Castro through the mediation, unknown to him, of his other enemy, Nikita Khrushchev.

When Khrushchev had agreed with Kennedy to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for a promise of no invasion, Castro had been almost as angry with Khrushchev as he was with Kennedy. He had reason to be upset. As Cuba’s former UN ambassador Carlos Lechuga put it in his book on the missile crisis, “[Castro] had been neither consulted nor even informed of the decision made in the Kremlin. The withdrawal of the missiles and the way that decision was made was a painful blow to both the Cuban government and people. Even though, looking back on events, it may be considered that war was averted, the problem had not been solved in a way that would remove the threat to Cuba.”
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All Cuba gained from the superpowers’ agreement was the promise by an imperialist president that the United States would not invade its tiny neighbor. Yet there were no guarantees that Kennedy or his successors would fulfill that pledge. Nor did the vow of no invasion mean an end to U.S. subversion of Cuba, as subsequent events proved. Castro was furious that his Soviet ally had suddenly withdrawn without consultation a nuclear deterrent to U.S. aggression. After the missile crisis, for days Castro was so angry that he refused even to meet with the Soviet ambassador in Havana.
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In his view Nikita Khrushchev had become a traitor.

Khrushchev responded to his repudiation by Castro by writing him what the Cuban premier described three decades later as “really a wonderful letter . . . a beautiful, elegant, very friendly letter.”
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In that January 31, 1963, letter to his estranged comrade, Khrushchev began, as he had in his first secret letter to Kennedy, with a description of the beauty surrounding him, in this case as he rode in a train returning to Moscow from a conference in Berlin:

“Our train is crossing the fields and forests of Soviet Byelorussia and it occurs to me how wonderful it would be if you could see, on a sunny day like this, the ground covered with snow and the forests silvery with frost.

“Perhaps you, a southern man, have seen this only in paintings. It must surely be fairly difficult for you to imagine the ground carpeted with snow and the forests covered with white frost. It would be good if you could visit our country each season of the year; every one of them, spring, summer, fall, and winter, has its delights.”
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Khrushchev said the principal theme of his letter was “the strong desire my comrades and I feel to see you and to talk, to talk with our hearts open.”
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He acknowledged the current strain “in the relations between our states—Cuba and the Soviet Union—and in our own personal relationship. Speaking frankly, these relations are not what they were before the crisis. I will not conceal the fact that this troubles and worries us. And it seems to me that the development of our relations will depend, in large part, on our meeting.”
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He then reviewed the Caribbean crisis, in which “our viewpoints did not always coincide,” appealing to Castro to recognize finally: “There are, in spite of everything, commitments that the United States of North America has undertaken through the statement of their president. Obviously, one cannot trust them and take it as an absolute guarantee, but neither is it reasonable to ignore them totally.”
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Khrushchev was, ever so gently, urging Castro to risk trusting Kennedy, as Khrushchev himself was beginning to do, in tandem with Kennedy’s beginning to trust him, sometimes to one or the other’s regret but with their mutually discovered commitment to peace as the foundation to which they could always return.

Castro accepted Khrushchev’s invitation to visit him that spring. He toured almost the entire Soviet Union in May and early June 1963, spending at least half the time with the leader he had rejected and shunned in November. According to Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei, it was then that “Father and Fidel developed a teacher-student relationship.”
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Castro’s own description of his time with Khrushchev has confirmed both its tutorial dimension and its focus on the missile crisis: “for hours [Khrushchev] read many messages to me, messages from President Kennedy, messages sometimes delivered through Robert Kennedy . . . There was a translator, and Khrushchev read and read the letters sent back and forth.”
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Khrushchev was trying to pass on to his Cuban comrade the paradoxical enlightenment for peace that he and Kennedy had received together from the brink of total war. While trying not to sound overly positive about a capitalist leader, Khrushchev also couldn’t help but reveal the extraordinary hope he felt because of what he and Kennedy had managed to resolve. As Sergei Khrushchev put it, “Father tried to persuade Castro that the U.S. president would keep his word and that Cuba was guaranteed six years of peaceful development, which was how long Father thought Kennedy would be in the White House. Six years! Almost an eternity!”
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In the course of reading aloud his correspondence with Kennedy, Khrushchev also inadvertently revealed to Castro that he and Kennedy had exchanged the withdrawal of missiles in Cuba for the withdrawal of missiles in Turkey and Italy. It showed that Khrushchev had other strategic considerations in mind besides the defense of Cuba. Castro recalled: “When this was read, I looked at him and said: ‘Nikita, would you please read that part again about the missiles in Turkey and Italy?’ He laughed that mischievous laugh of his. He laughed, but that was it. I was sure that they were not going to repeat it again because it was like that old phrase about bringing up the issue of the noose in the home of the man who was hung.”
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As we know, even before Castro visited the Soviet Union, he had already begun to turn toward Kennedy through his friendly exchanges with the president’s negotiator for the Bay of Pigs prisoners, James Donovan, and in response to Kennedy’s April crackdown on Cuban exile attacks. Further encouraged by Khrushchev’s tutorial, Castro returned to Havana confirmed in his resolve to negotiate with his enemy, John Kennedy. The CIA continued to monitor every step of this process. In a secret June 5, 1963, memorandum, Richard Helms wrote that the CIA had just received a report that, “at the request of Khrushchev, Castro was returning to Cuba with the intention of adopting a conciliatory policy toward the Kennedy administration ‘for the time being.’”
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The CIA cut short this development by its sabotage program (that Kennedy approved on June 19) and by its own attempt once again to assassinate Castro. Toward the end of the summer of 1963, CIA case officers met with an undercover CIA agent code-named AM/LASH, who lived in Cuba. AM/LASH was close to Fidel Castro. At the meeting he discussed with his CIA case officers an “inside job” against Castro. He said he was “awaiting a U.S. plan of action.”
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This was reported to CIA Headquarters on September 7. We will learn more about that Castro assassination plan, as the CIA shapes and directs it to converge with John Kennedy’s assassination.

Early the next morning, Premier Fidel Castro was interviewed at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana following a reception. In a September 9 article in U.S. papers, Associated Press reporter Daniel Harker said Castro had delivered “a rambling, informal post-midnight dissertation,” in the course of which he warned “U.S. leaders” if they aided any attempt to eliminate Cuban leaders: “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”
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When Castro was questioned about this statement by the HSCA in 1978, he said, “I don’t remember literally what I said, but I remember my intention in saying what I said and it was to warn the government that we know about the (attempted) plots against our lives . . . So, I said something like those plots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious one—that that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions . . . but I did not mean to threaten by that . . . I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures—similar measures—like a retaliation for that.”
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