Live by the Sword Read online

  But a different Bobby Kennedy, five years earlier, had berated government officers 20 years his senior for their slow pace in eliminating Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

  More than most, Bobby himself appreciated the importance of his personal transformation following the assassination. Toward the end of his life, he mused, “I have wondered at times if we did not pay a very great price for being more energetic than wise about a lot of things, especially Cuba.”

  He was right.

  Gus Russo

  Baltimore, MD

  August 1998

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  (In chronological order by section)

  Members of the U.S. Intelligence Community

  Allen Welsh Dulles

  CIA Director during the Cold War Warren Commissioner

  Richard Bissell

  CIA Director of Covert Operations

  Jake Esterline

  CIA Coordinator of Bay of Pigs

  Lyman Kirkpatrick

  CIA Inspector General

  John McCone

  CIA Director after Allen Dulles

  E. Howard Hunt

  CIA CubaProject Officer; Watergate burglar

  Joseph Caldwell (“J.C.”) King

  CIA Western Hemisphere Chief

  Robert Maheu

  CIA freelancer; Former FBI Agent

  Charlie Ford

  CIA Case Officer(Mafia-CIA liaison)

  Richard Helms

  CIA Deputy Director of Plans CIA Director (after Dulles)

  William King Harvey

  CIA Officer in charge of ZR/RIFLE Coordinator of Task Force W

  Sam Halpern

  CIA Executive Assistant to William Harvey the Cuba Project; and, later, Desmond FitzGerald

  Theodore Shackley

  CIA Station Chief, JM/WAVE (Miami)

  Desmond FitzGerald

  CIA Special Affairs Staff, Cuba

  Lt. Commander John Gordon III (USN)

  Naval Intelligence Officer Office of Field Intelligence Guantanamo Bay

  Win Scott

  CIA Station Chief, Mexico City

  David Atlee Phillips

  CIA Director of Covert Operation Cuban Affairs, Mexico City

  James Angleton

  CIA Counterintelligence Chief

  American Politicians

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK)

  President (1961-1963)

  Robert Francis Kennedy (RFK)

  Attorney General (1961-1964)

  Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ)

  Vice-President (1961-1963) President (1963-1969)

  Joseph Kennedy Sr.

  Father of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  President (1953-1961)

  Richard Nixon

  Eisenhower’s Vice-President; Later President

  John Connally

  Governor of Texas

  Bobby Baker

  Friend of Lyndon Johnson

  Anti-Castro Cubans and other Anti-Castro Activists

  Sergio Arcadia Smith (Arcadia)

  Cuban Revolutionary Council Delegate New Orleans

  David Ferrie

  Anti-Castro activist for Arcacha; Freelancer for Banister

  Fulgencio Batista

  President of Cuba before Fidel Castro took power

  Manuel Artime

  Military Leader of Brigade 2506

  Second Naval Guerrilla organizer Founder of the Movement for Revolutionary Recovery

  Rolando Cubela Secades (Cubela)

  AM/LASH (Proposed assassin of Fidel Castro)

  Gerry Hemming

  American mercenary Anti-Castro activist

  Layton Martens

  Volunteer with Cuban Revolutionary Council New Orleans

  Guy Banister

  Detective, New Orleans Former FBI Special Agent in Charge, Chicago

  Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams

  Former member of Brigade 2506 Friend of Robert F. Kennedy

  Roberto San Román (Roberto)

  Commander of Brigade 2506 Friend of Robert F. Kennedy

  Pepe San Román (Pepe)

  Commander of Brigade 2506 Friend of Robert F. Kennedy

  Pro-Castro Individuals (and Their Loved Ones)

  Fidel Castro

  Cuban President

  Lee Harvey Oswald

  Murderer of John F. Kennedy

  Raul Castro

  Brother of Fidel Castro, and second-in-line for presidency

  Che Guevara

  Second-in-command to Fidel Castro

  Marina Oswald

  Wife of Oswald

  Marguerite Oswald

  Mother of Oswald

  Organized Crime Figures, Gamblers, and Associates

  Meyer Lansky

  Organized crime leader dispensed casino franchises in Batista’s Cuba

  Norman Rothman

  Associate of Meyer Lansky Cuban casino manager

  Santos Trafficante, Jr

  Mafia leader, Tampa, FL controlled Cuban casinos in Batista’s Cuba

  Johnny Rosselli

  Las Vegas Mafia: “Mr. Smooth” worked with CIA on assassination plots especially Phase One

  Sam Giancana

  Chicago Mafia Don

  Michael (Mike) McLaney

  Shareholder in Hotel Nacional Friend of Joseph Kennedy, Sr.

  William McLaney

  Brother of Mike McLaney (in New Orleans)

  Carlos Marcello

  New Orleans Mafia Don

  Soviet Leaders and Diplomats

  Nikita Khrushchev

  Premier

  Valery Kostikov

  KGB agent;Consular Official Russian Consulate, Mexico City

  American Planners and Officials

  Robert McNamara

  Secretary of Defense

  Admiral Arleigh Burke

  Chief of Naval Operations

  General Maxwell Taylor

  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  Brigadier General Edward Lansdale

  White House Coordinator of Operation MONGOOSE

  Dean Rusk

  Secretary of State

  Admiral Robert Dennison

  Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet (CINCLANT)

  General Alexander Haig

  Cuban Coordinating Committee Deputy to Joseph Califano Military assistant to Cyrus Vance

  Cyrus Vance

  Secretary of the Army; Cuban Coordinating Committee

  Joseph Califano

  Director of the Cuban Coordinating Committee

  Nicholas Katzenbach

  Deputy Attorney General under Robert F. Kennedy Attorney General after RFK

  Presidential Aides

  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr

  Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy

  McGeorge Bundy

  National Security Advisor to John F. Kennedy

  Walt Rostow

  Advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson

  FBI Officials

  J. Edgar Hoover

  Director of the FBI

  Jim Hosty

  FBI Agent in Dallas; Case Officer for Oswald

  Warren DeBrueys

  FBI Special Agent in Charge, New Orleans

  Investigators and Others

  G. Robert Blakey

  Chief Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (after Richard Sprague)

  Sylvia Duran

  Secretary to the Consul, Cuban Consulate, Mexico City

  J.D. Tippit

  Police Officer, Dallas

  Jim Garrison

  District Attorney, New Orleans

  Earl Warren

  Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Chairman of the Warren Commission

  Gerald R. Ford

  Warren Commissioner; Later President

  Clay Shaw

  Private citizen, New Orleans

  Nelso
n Rockefeller

  Gerald Ford’s Vice-President Director of the Rockefeller Commission

  Frank Church

  Senator, Idaho (D); Chairman of the Church Committee

  Richard Sprague

  Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)

  KENNEDY

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE STORY BEGINS

  The Backstory: Cuba in the 1950’s and the Emergence of Fidel Castro

  “Cuba seems to have the same effect on American administrations as the full moon used to have on werewolves.”

  —Wayne Smith, Former U.S. State Department Officer in Havana

  At the center of it all was Cuba—a small tropical island a mere 90 miles off the U.S. coast. Its recent, tumultuous, and largely secret past is the hidden key which unlocks the mysteries of the century’s most important mystery. Only by coming to grips with Cuba can any of us truly understand that catastrophic day in Dallas, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and when the trust between a nation and its citizens began to crumble. Nor, in an intelligent way, can U.S. foreign policy be crafted and executed without knowing what motivated U.S. leaders to wage an undeclared war against the tiny, and seemingly insignificant, country of Cuba.

  In the United States of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, Cuba was a ticking time bomb. During a lengthy period of Cold War hostility, the antagonism between Cuba and the United States became so well-established that in 1963, when John Kennedy was killed, many Americans felt that the U.S.-Cuban disputes had been going on forever. Actually, the conflict was quite young. But by making it their Alpha and Omega, the brothers Kennedy escalated the tensions beyond all reason, and thus guaranteed their own downfall. For while the U.S. government preached its own brand of jingoism, it was matched by the feverish activities of those who believed Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, to be a virtual Messiah. The polarities that created such volatile obsessions are rooted in Cuba’s unique history.

  For years, Cuba had been an American vassal. The U.S. had forced itself into the Cuban constitution with the inclusion of the notorious “Platt Amendment,” which allowed for U.S. intervention whenever it felt the urge. Until Castro’s 1959 revolution, Cuba was ruled by a series of dictators who redefined the terms graft and corruption. The most corrupt of these was President Fulgencio Batista, who controlled the country until the Castro takeover. And, as pointed out by historian Michael Beschloss, Batista had ingratiated himself nicely with his neighbors to the north:

  During World War II, he enlisted Cuba behind the Allies, protecting the American naval base at Guantanamo and selling Cuba’s 1941 sugar crop to the United States at bargain prices. By the 1950’s Americans owned 40 percent of the Cuban sugar industry, 80 percent of Cuban utilities, and 90 percent of Cuban mining.1

  Under Batista, Cuba’s economic involvement with the U.S. exploded. By the 1950’s, 75 percent of Cuba’s imports were from the United States, which benefited from the fact that its commodities enjoyed a unique exemption from Cuban import duties. By 1958, American investments on the island were approaching the 1 billion dollar mark. The signs of American business and culture were inescapable in Cuba. The Chase Manhattan Bank, Procter and Gamble, Colgate, Texaco, Goodyear, Remington, Borden, Sears, Ford, U.S. Rubber, Standard Oil, Coke, Pepsi—all had substantial holdings on the island.

  The Kennedys themselves were among those to benefit from this tropical nest-egg. According to some reports, Joseph Kennedy Sr. had owned stock in a profitable Coca-Cola franchise on the island with Irish tenor and Coke spokesman Morton Downey, Sr.2 In addition, Robert Kennedy’s father-in-law, George Skakel, had financial holdings in Cuba, represented there by Cuban attorney Dr. Carlos Johns.3 Skakel’s company, Great Lakes Carbon, had made the family wealthy. Great Lakes’ worldwide holdings included some in Batista-era Cuba, where the firm supplied filters used in the sugar industry. Skakel maintained close friendships with CIA officers, often supplying them with intelligence data he received from the island, some of which would later be used to plan the Bay of Pigs invasion. When the Castro enterprise began, his daughter, Ethel, was known to fear its revolutionary tendencies, and pray for its defeat.4

  Castro also profited from the excesses of the Batista era and its relationship with the United States. His father had made money from the American-owned United Fruit Company, which had a presence on the island. The young Fidel even tried to cash in on the U.S.-Cuban relationship in professional baseball. In the 1940’s, legendary American baseball scout Joe Cambria twice turned down Fidel Castro, then a young, athletic baseball player. “Uncle Joe scouted Castro and told him he didn’t have a major league arm,” said Washington Senators’ owner Clark Griffith, who employed Cambria to milk Latin America for its raw baseball talent.

  Fellow scout Ruben Amaro jokes, “[Cambria] could have changed history if he remembered that some pitchers just mature late.”5 And Castro’s pitching did mature. By the late 1940’s, he became known for his wicked curve ball. One Pittsburgh Pirates scout recalled, “He could set ‘em up with the curve, blow ‘em down with the heater.” By 1949, Castro was indeed offered a contract with the New York Giants and a $5,000 signing bonus. But by then Castro’s law studies and political interests had taken root. “We couldn’t believe he turned us down,” remembered a Giants scout. “Nobody from Latin America had [ever] said ‘no’ before.”6

  Other beneficiaries of the Batista regime included prominent representatives of organized crime. Havana had become a kind of offshore Las Vegas, and Mafia enterprises were obscenely profitable. Raw opium from South America (and possibly from Asia) was processed on the island. Cuban children suffered from disease and malnutrition, but the casinos reaped huge profits ($100 million profit from gambling alone, according to the best estimates).7 These were supplemented by earnings from abortion services and prostitution. The island was a great draw for American tourists.

  The corrupt Batista even hired U.S. mob boss Meyer Lansky to (in the dictator’s words) “clean up” the casinos. Lansky, at the time a fugitive from the IRS, was happy to accept the offer. Soon, crime figures from Las Vegas, Miami, Cleveland, and elsewhere were moving in on Havana, where Lansky doled out the casino franchises.

  Batista’s corruption was recently summarized by historian Thomas G. Paterson:

  Probably 20 to 25% of government expenditures represented graft and payoffs. Batista’s personal wealth stood somewhere between $60 and $300 million. In 1959 revolutionary government officials opened his safe deposit boxes and found $20 million. . . When Batista and his close corruptionists fled the country as 1958 turned into 1959, they took with them—nobody knows how much for sure—some 350 million pesos of the national treasury (one peso equaled one dollar).8

  But the bubble was soon to burst, for Batista’s greed began to foster strong revolutionary movements which threatened to topple the dictator. When Castro started his movement in the early 1950’s, many key players in Cuba, weary from extortion by the Batista regime, were willing to assist. For a time, according to Cuban soldier Ramon Conte, Castro enlisted the CIA’s help and himself became a CIA informant.9 CIA agent Ross Crozier, who was assigned to work with Fidel in the mountains as he prepared his final push against the Batista regime, recently corroborated this: “[CIA Western Hemisphere Chief] J.C. King had come down to talk to Fidel in 1959.”10 Castro so wanted the Americans’ support, according to Crozier, that he readily supplied Crozier with details of his own troop movements. “Fidel gave us much intelligence. I went on the Manzanillo raid with him.” Crozier still possesses a letter of introduction, written on his behalf by Fidel, in which the Cuban leader instructed his associates to give “Mr. Ross” all the cooperation he needed, including access to Raul Castro, his brother.

  In December 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent a representative to Havana to persuade Batista to resign. However, on January 1, 1959, before Batista could respond, Castro marched victoriously into the streets of Havana, declaring, “For the f
irst time, the Republic will really be entirely free.” He later declared, “The Platt Amendment is finished.”

  One of Castro’s first acts as Cuba’s leader was to close the largely American-owned casinos (together with many of the country clubs), which the emerging dictator turned into schools and hospitals. “When the barbudos (‘bearded ones’) from the hills marched into Havana the day after New Year’s of 1959,” a historian of the period recently wrote, “the first thing the happy street throngs did was to smash parking meters and slot machines in the casinos, the most immediate symbols of the American presence in their lives.”11 Fidel next nationalized all international businesses on the island. Huge enterprises like Coca-Cola and United Fruit, not to mention their owners, suffered greatly.12

  Batista’s departure and Castro’s takeover began a huge influx of disenchanted and fearful Cubans to the nearby coasts of the United States, particularly Miami and New Orleans. No wonder. On his island nation, Castro was orchestrating a political purge, dominated by trials and executions of “war criminals.” The year following his takeover of Cuba, he presided over the machine-gun executions of thousands of handcuffed opponents, who were then bulldozed into mass graves. Thousands more were left to rot, naked, in solitary cells on the Isle of Pines. The year 1961 was officially declared “The Year of the Firing Squad” by Castro lieutenant Captain Antonio Jimenez.13