The
Darkest Day
Fifty
years later, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories still swirl around the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy
By Peter Kornbluh | From Liev Schreiber,
November/December 2013
https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/the-darkest-day-17323
On the
morning of November 22, 1963, a CIA operative named Nestor Sanchez arrived in
Paris carrying a Paper Mate pen that contained a hidden hypodermic needle—a
Cold War weapon specifically created by the agency’s Technical Services
Division to kill Fidel Castro. At a meeting in an undisclosed location later
that day, Sanchez provided the converted pen to a Cuban military
officer—codenamed “AMLASH”—who was the CIA’s highest level asset in Cuba. The
two discussed how to fill it with a deadly poison called “Blackleaf 40.” But
AMLASH considered trying to prick Castro with a rigged pen to be a suicide
mission; instead he requested a high-powered, long-range, sniper rifle. As the
two left their meeting, they received word that John F. Kennedy had been
assassinated in Dallas. “It is very likely,” a top secret CIA history on plots
to kill Castro later emphasized, “that at the very moment President Kennedy was
shot a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an
assassination device to use against Castro.”
On that
same day and at that very same moment, some 5,000 miles away in Cuba Fidel
Castro was meeting with an emissary sent by President Kennedy to offer a
possible rapprochement between Washington and Havana. The Cuban leader and the
president’s “messenger of peace”—a French journalist named Jean Daniel—had just
finished a lunch of freshly caught fish. They were discussing the
potential restoration of normalcy in U.S.-Cuban relations when Castro received
a phone call reporting that Kennedy had been shot. “This is terrible,” Castro
told Daniel, realizing that his mission of peace had been aborted by an
assassin’s bullet. And then Castro predicted: “They are going to say we did
it.”
Fifty
years after the death of the president in Dallas, the confluence of these
dramatic, but coincidental, events on November 22, 1963, continues to provide
fodder for a range of assassination conspiracy theorists who place Cuba at the
center of their theories. From the right, conspiracy buffs have postulated
that Fidel Castro managed to manipulate a revolutionary wannabe named Lee
Harvey Oswald into killing Kennedy before Kennedy could kill Castro; from the
left, numerous theories speculate that the CIA and other nefarious national
security operatives assassinated the president because he had become “soft” on
Communism—particularly in Cuba—and wanted to end the Cold War. After five
decades of endless investigation and unproven hypotheses there remains little
evidence to challenge the conclusion of the official investigative commission
led by Chief Justice Earl Warren: Oswald, acting alone and for his own reasons,
killed JFK. Nevertheless, Cuba and Kennedy’s policies
toward the Cuban revolution remain a central part of the public fascination
with the “whodunit” of the murder of the president.
“We resist the idea that a nobody could do something as big as this,” one of
John F. Kennedy’s top White House aides, Theodore Sorensen, told a New
York Times reporter 20 years ago. Indeed, the American public has found it
hard to accept that the most notorious crime of the 20th century could have
been generated by an itinerate loner like Oswald. A Gallup poll taken shortly
after the assassination found that 52 percent of the public believed Oswald had
been part of a larger conspiracy; another Gallup poll on the fortieth
anniversary of Kennedy’s death recorded that 75 percent of Americans believed
more than one individual was responsible. “If you put the murdered president of
the United States on one side of the scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the
other side, it doesn’t balance,” as author William Manchester explained the
national sense of incredulity. “You want to add something weightier to Oswald.
It would invest the president’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom.
He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job
nicely.”
Conspiracy
theorists have certainly devoted themselves to that task. As if to feed the
widespread wish to find a master criminal who fit the magnitude of the crime,
an entire conspiracy industry has proliferated over the years. More than 2,000
books and many thousands of articles have been written. Major organizations
such as the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) and the Mary Ferrell
Foundation have pursued the story of the assassination for decades. As the 50th
anniversary of the assassination arrives, new websites such as JFKFacts.org
have been created to centralize theories, documentation and the always ongoing
debate over who, if not Oswald alone, killed Kennedy and why. That question has
generated countless responses, many of them paranoid and preposterous. Lyndon
Johnson killed the president, a group of gays killed the president, the
military-industrial complex killed the president, the mafia and/or the CIA
killed the president…these are just a few of the dozens of speculative theories
still circulating on the 50th anniversary.
Conspiracy
fantasies formed around many elements of the assassination, among them: the
discrepancies between the bullet holes in the president’s body and in his suit
coat, the so-called “magic bullet” that pierced Kennedy’s neck and then went
through the shoulder of Texas Governor John Connally seated in front of him,
the shadows on the famous photo of Oswald holding the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle
used to shoot Kennedy, and the inaccuracies of the autopsy reports on the
president’s injuries. One best-selling conspiracy book, Best Evidence, by David
Lifton, claimed that the body in the casket that was put aboard Air Force One
in Dallas to transport the dead president home was not the same one that was
taken off the plane when it landed in Washington. “The conspiracy
theories are divorced from reality,” Jeremy Gunn, former staff director of the
Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) told Cigar Aficionado, “and
divorced from common sense.”
The
creation of the ARRB by Congress in 1992 owes to the mass marketing of perhaps
the most discredited and disreputable of all Kennedy assassination conspiracy
theories: the witch hunt in New Orleans by local prosecutor Jim Garrison.
Garrison originally claimed that the assassination of the president was “a
homosexual thrill-killing”—and, on trumped up charges, unsuccessfully
prosecuted a local businessman for the crime; he later expanded the pool of
conspirators to include the CIA and FBI. His infamous investigation became the
basis of the popular 1991 Oliver Stone movie, JFK, starring Kevin Costner.
Like
Garrison’s investigation, the movie was utter fiction. But it galvanized public
outrage over the U.S. government secrecy that continued to surround the Kennedy
assassination. “Even the records created by the investigative commissions
and committees were withheld from public view and sealed,” noted the Executive
Summary of the ARRB report. “The suspicions created by government secrecy
eroded confidence in the truthfulness of federal agencies in general and
damaged their credibility.” The inexplicable lack of transparency, along with
the corrosive nature of the conspiracy theories that filled the void left by
the still hidden historical record, mobilized Congress in 1992 to pass the “JFK
Act,” which mandated the review and opening of all documentation concerned with
the death of the president.
The
result was one of the most far-reaching declassification projects ever
undertaken by the U.S. government. Under the supervision of a five-member board
chaired by Judge John Tunheim, the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, White House and
all other relevant government and law-enforcement agencies spent four years locating,
reviewing and releasing an estimated 5 million pages relating specifically and
broadly to all direct and indirect aspects of the assassination—none of which
disproved original findings of the Warren Commission that Oswald acted alone.
On Cuba, the Kennedy assassination records included detailed CIA operational
cables and reports on covert operations to kill or overthrow Castro in the
early 1960s.
“The
agency made a genuine and sincere effort to declassify everything that was
mandated by law,” says Brian Latell, who as the then-director of the CIA’s
Center for the Study of Intelligence oversaw the agency’s work with the
Assassination Records Review Board. But there were “lots of fights with the
board” over declassifying specific documents, he recalled. “In every case it
was sources and methods.”
Indeed,
as the ARRB prepared to close its doors in 1998, it identified 1,100 additional
CIA records as “assassination-related.” The Agency, however, refused to release
them until 2017—the year the JFK Act states all remaining intelligence records
must be declassified. Similarly, the CIA continues to fight a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit brought by assassination scholar Jefferson Morley for
the papers of the agency’s case officer for an anti-Castro group of exiles that
had several encounters with the pro-Castro Oswald in New Orleans. By continuing
to keep relevant records secret, the CIA has fanned the flames of speculation
on Cuba’s role in the assassination, as well as the CIA’s role itself.
Castro’s
prediction that “they are going to say we did it,” proved prescient. The very
first accusation of a Cuba/Oswald conspiracy came just six days after the
assassination, on November 28, when CIA Director John McCone briefed President
Johnson on Oswald’s visits in late September to both the Cuban and Soviet
Embassies in Mexico City. CIA intercepts of telephone calls revealed that
Oswald was seeking “travel permits to Cuba and thence to the Soviet Union for
himself and his wife,” McCone advised in a top secret update on the
investigation into Kennedy’s assassination. But McCone also reported that a
Nicaraguan intelligence operative named Gilberto Alvarado had “advised our
[Mexico] station in great detail on his alleged knowledge that he actually saw
Oswald given $6,500 in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City on September
18th.” Alvarado claimed the money was to pay for killing the president of
the United States.
Both the
CIA and the FBI had concrete evidence, however, that Oswald had been in New
Orleans on September 18—he did not travel to Mexico City until September 26th.
During questioning at a safe-house in Mexico City, Alvarado failed a polygraph
test and retracted his claims. He was “totally discredited,” recalls the CIA’s
Brian Latell.
Nevertheless,
with the growing public clamor about an international Communist conspiracy,
President Johnson moved quickly to appoint a presidential commission on the
assassination. “Now these wild people are charging Khrushchev killed Kennedy
and Castro killed Kennedy,” he told Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren,
who Johnson appointed to chair the investigation. “But the American people and
the world have got to know who killed Kennedy and why.”
Although
one informant who pointed the finger at Cuba was dismissed, the CIA also
pursued information from a second informant—a leftist politician from Panama.
This high-level “asset” had been personally recruited by veteran CIA operative
Jacob Esterline to penetrate Castro’s inner circle. Esterline served as station
chief in Caracas, and later senior manager of the Bay of Pigs operation. “They
told me they would never do that,” the asset reported to Esterline after the
assassination—a vague remark he and his agency colleagues interpreted as their
informant’s belief in possible Cuban complicity.
According
to Esterline, this comment set off an internal investigation, codenamed “Black
Walnut,” into whether the Cubans had anything to do with Kennedy’s death.
The sensitivity of “sources and methods,” in this case the identity of one the
agency’s most important sources inside Cuba, has kept this investigation—it
presumably cleared the Cubans of wrongdoing—hidden for half a century.
“Black
Walnut” would not be the last of such internal inquiries; a dozen years later
in the wake of the first major public revelations of CIA efforts to kill Castro
using poison pills, toxic cigars, exploding sea shells and Paper Mate pens
rigged with hidden syringes, the agency was forced to revisit the issue of
whether its own assassination plots might have prompted Castro to retaliate.
At the
time of Kennedy’s death, CIA “executive action” operations to eliminate Castro,
codenamed “ZR/RIFLE,” were so secret that they were deliberately withheld from
the Warren Commission. In 1975, however, an investigative Senate committee led
by Senator Frank Church released a report titled “Alleged Assassination Plots
Involving Foreign Leaders,” which described, in shocking detail, the CIA’s
clandestine assassination efforts—among them the Sanchez/AMLASH meeting in
Paris on the day President Kennedy was killed. The report drew heavily on a top
secret, 138-page internal CIA history, “Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel
Castro,” compiled in 1967 by the CIA’s own inspector general. The public
revelations of the Church Committee report forced another CIA inspector general
to assess whether Castro might have preempted the obviously failed efforts to
murder him.
That
second inspector general report, titled “What Could Castro have Known?”
examined the “cause-and-effect relationship between the [CIA’s Castro] plans
and President Kennedy’s death.” The agency’s inspector general detailed three
specific plots, including the AMLASH operation, to determine whether at any
point Castro would have known enough to have acted first. Since the
assassination device was only passed to AMLASH on the actual day Kennedy was
killed, the inspector general inferred that Castro would not have known in
advance of that plot.
“One can
speculate,” the report concluded, “as to whether or not Castro actually learned
of the plans described above and, if so, the details that he would have
learned. Assuming that he learned something—which is not all that clear—he
would still have had to know enough detail to have devised that it was a U.S.
Government action as the basis for launching a counterattack in the form of Lee
Harvey Oswald, as has been postulated by some. The basic issue arises from
speculation, and speculation cannot satisfactorily resolve it.”
In his
recently published book, Castro’s Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA and the
Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Brian Latell, now a retired CIA analyst
teaching at University of Miami, argues that even if Cuba did not instruct
Oswald to kill the president, Castro knew about his plans to do so in advance.
This theory seems unlikely; all indications are that Oswald decided,
impulsively, to seize the opportunity to shoot the president only the day
before his trip to Dallas. Speculation, sheer though it may be, continues about
a shadowy Cuban role in the Kennedy assassination.
Even more conspiracy writers have speculated that Cuba was not the sponsor of
the violence that shook the nation on November 22, 1963, but rather its
subject—to terminate the president’s effort to pursue a peaceful coexistence
with Cuba, CIA officials conspired with other sinister forces to terminate the
president. In books such as Peter Dale Scott’s Deep Politics II: Essays on
Oswald, Mexico and Cuba, and Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation, Oswald is
depicted as either a CIA patsy or a cover for additional assassins positioned
on the famous “grassy knoll.” The motivation of Kennedy’s killers was to
eliminate the president before he could end the Cold War—in the Caribbean, and
elsewhere.
At the
time of his death, Kennedy was indeed pursuing secret talks with Castro. The
message of possible reconciliation that the U.S. president sent to Castro
through Jean Daniel became public shortly after the assassination when the
French journalist published a detailed account on his role as an “unofficial
envoy” in the New Republic, and in a front-page New York Times article. His
meetings with both Kennedy and Castro, Daniel wrote in the Times on December
11, 1963, had established “in effect a dialogue between President Kennedy and
Premier Fidel Castro.”
In fact,
the White House had been quietly pursuing talks with Cuba for months—using a
series of secret intermediaries and interlocutors before Daniel. James Donovan,
a New York lawyer who Robert Kennedy had picked to negotiate the release of
more than 1,000 exiles captured by Cuban forces at the CIA-sponsored Bay of
Pigs invasion, became the first intermediary. After Castro broached the
possibility of expanding talks on the prisoner releases to improve overall
relations to Donovan, the president instructed his top aides to “start thinking
along more flexible lines” in negotiating with Castro.
In late
April, a correspondent for ABC News named Lisa Howard who had traveled to Havana
to do a televised special on the Cuban revolution replaced Donovan as the
central interlocutor. When she returned from Cuba, Howard debriefed CIA deputy
director Richard Helms on Castro’s clear interest in improved relations. In a
top secret memorandum that arrived on the desk of the president, Helm’s
reported that “Howard definitely wants to impress the U.S. Government with two
facts: Castro is ready to discuss rapprochement and she herself is ready to
discuss it with him if asked to do so by the U.S. Government.”
Predictably,
the CIA adamantly opposed any dialogue with Cuba. The agency was
institutionally invested in its ongoing efforts to covertly roll back the
revolution. In a secret memo rushed to the White House on May 1, 1963, CIA
Director John McCone requested that “no active steps be taken on the
rapprochement matter at this time” and urged only the “most limited Washington
discussions” on accommodation with Castro.
But in
the fall of 1963, Washington and Havana did take active steps toward actual negotiations.
In September Howard used a cocktail party at her E. 74th St. Manhattan
townhouse as cover for the first meeting between a Cuban official, UN
Ambassador Carlos Lechuga, and a U.S. official, deputy UN Ambassador William
Attwood. Using Howard as a secret back channel, Castro and Kennedy then began
passing messages about arranging an actual negotiation session between the two
nations.
On
November 5, Kennedy’s secret taping system recorded a conversation with his
national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, on whether to send Attwood to Havana
to meet secretly with Castro. Attwood, Bundy told the president, “now has an
invitation to go down and talk to Fidel about terms and conditions in which he
would be interested in a change of relations with the U.S.” The president is
heard agreeing to the idea but asking if “we can get Attwood off the payroll
before he goes” so as to “sanitize” him as a private citizen in case word of
the secret meeting leaked.
On
November 14, Howard arranged for Attwood to come to her home and talk via
telephone to Castro’s top aide, René Vallejo, about obtaining the Cuban agenda
for a secret meeting in Havana with the Cuban commandante. Vallejo agreed to
transmit a proposed agenda to Cuba’s UN ambassador, Lechuga, to give to the Americans.
When Attwood passed this information on to Bundy at the White House, he was
told that when the agenda was received, “the president wanted to see me at the
White House and decide what to say and whether to go [to Cuba] or what we
should do next.”
“That
was the 19th of November,” Attwood recalled. “Three days before the
assassination.”
As this
dramatic history emerged over the past 25 years, it became grist for some of
the more popular conspiracy theories, not only on the how but why Kennedy was
killed. Early in the opening scenes of the movie, JFK, for example, a narrator
sets the stage for the assassination by stating: “more rumors emerge of JFK’s
backdoor efforts outside usual State Department and CIA channels to establish
dialogue with Fidel Castro through contacts at the United Nations in New York.
Kennedy is seeking change on all fronts.” It was JFK’s “turn toward peace” that
led to his assassination, according to James Douglass’s chronicle of these
conspiratorial events, JFK and the Unspeakable, which has gained a popular
following.
“JFK
pursued a series of actions—right up to the week of his death—that caused
members of his own military intelligence establishment to regard him as a
virtual traitor who had to be eliminated,” the book argues. In the aftermath of
the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost led to nuclear war, Kennedy, sought a
détente with both Khrushchev and Castro, the book reports. “For turning to
peace with his enemy (and ours) Kennedy was murdered by a power we cannot
describe.”
“The imaginative recreation of the Kennedy assassination has been a way to
explore the twin issues of confidence and conspiracy in U.S. history,”
Jefferson Morley has written. The government secrecy that has accompanied the
Kennedy assassination, while significantly reduced by the JFK Act, has eroded
public confidence in official findings, while enhancing the validity of
conspiracy theories—completely implausible and off-the-wall as some may be. The
credibility of the Warren Commission findings have been severely undercut by
the fact that the CIA withheld from its investigators all information on its
Castro-assassination plots. Yet with the clear corrosive effect of undue
secrecy on the American psyche, after 50 years there are still “sources and
methods” the CIA feels compelled to hide, and records related to Cuba
operations in 1963 that it claims still cannot be declassified.
In
anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, last year
officials at the National Declassification Center, the government agency that
pushes for prioritizing the release of still-secret historical records,
approached the CIA about releasing all remaining Kennedy assassination records,
as a historical contribution to the nation. But the “securocrats” at CIA claimed
they did not have the time and resources to meet that deadline. The public
would have to wait till 2017 before the remaining 1,100 records will be
reviewed and, perhaps, finally opened.But what is now known about the CIA,
Kennedy’s Cuba policies, the assassination and Oswald’s actions leaves an
extraordinary and bitter irony. As historian Max Holland pointed out 20 years
ago in a little read essay in Reviews in American History on “Making Sense of
the Assassination,”Oswald’s violent acts were “manifestly political” and based
on “a drive to be recognized as a revolutionary capable of the daring act.” A
would-be communist, and one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, he
saw himself as a political actor who had the opportunity to save Cuba from the
policies of U.S. aggression that he had likely read about in the New Orleans
newspapers. The AMLASH mission and others like it may have come back to haunt
the U.S., noted veteran journalist Daniel Schorr, who broke the story of the
CIA’s assassination plots against Castro. “An arrow launched into the air to
kill a foreign leader may well have fallen back to kill our own.”
What
Oswald could not have known was that his act of assassination would actually
terminate a significant secret effort by President Kennedy to explore détente
in the Caribbean, and fundamentally change the framework of a hostile U.S.
policy toward the Castro revolution. “This is an end to your mission of peace,
this is an end to your mission of peace,” Castro said to Daniel as they listened
to a radio report that President Kennedy had died in Dallas.
Fifty
years later, that sad fact remains the ultimate historical irony of the Kennedy
assassination.
Peter Kornbluh is an analyst at the National Security Archive, and is coauthor
of a forthcoming book on the history of dialog between the U.S. and Cuba.
