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Chapter 6 

Cuba and CIA poison

In continuation of his relationship with Khrushchev, in 1963 Kennedy tried to establish dialogue with Fidel Castro, in an attempt to resolve disputes and develop diplomatic relations. The CIA, however, worked to sabotage his efforts. It would be a friend faithful to Dulles, Richard Helms, who would replace Richard Bissell as Deputy Director of Plans and, taking counsel from his former bosses, he steered the new Director John McCone away from sensitive issues. At the end of 1960, Bissell contacted Chicago’s Sam Giancana and Miami’s Santos Trafficante via the emissary of the mafia Johnny Roselli, in order to place a $150,000 contract on Castro’s head. Helms pursued this arrangement without McCone’s knowledge, as he admitted in 1975 before the Church Committee. The President, of course, was also kept in the dark, on the grounds that “Nobody wants to embarrass a president of the United States by discussing the assassination of foreign leaders in his presence”.


In an attempt to poison the Cuban leader, Helms also tried to use Castro’s companions who, though disappointed by his conversion to communism, still had access to his person. He charged his Technical Services Staff, a division under the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to develop an arsenal of poisons and gadgets for this purpose. October 29th 1963, for example, Helms connected his Deputy Desmond Fitzgerald with Cuban Rolando Cubela, who had secretly contacted the CIA to betray Castro, but was perhaps, in reality, commissioned by Castro himself to inform him ofattempts against his life. It was agreed between Helms and Fitzgerald that, “Fitzgerald should hold himself out as a personal representative of Attorney General Robert Kennedy”, but that, “it was not necessary to seek approval from Robert Kennedy for Fitzgerald to speak in his name”. This confession given before the Church Committee, illustrates howthe principle of “plausible deniability”, rather than protecting the executive in case of failure, could be used to bypass him. After having long spread the rumor that plans to assassinate Castro had been ordained by Robert Kennedy, and having insinuated that he was therefore responsible for the death of his brother when these plans backfired against the Kennedys in 1963, Helms was forced to admit to the Church Committee that he had never received Robert’s consent, but had only “the feeling that [RFK] would not be unhappy if [Castro] had disappeared off the scene by whatever means”.


A particularly sinister manipulation took place in April 1963, when Helms tried to use a peace ambassador ofthe American President to poison Castro. In August 1962, the Kennedy brothers sent to Havana a young lawyer named James Donovan to negotiate the release of 1113 Bay of Pigs prisoners (in exchange for $53 million in food, medicine and equipment). Donovan travelled to Cuba three times and established a very friendly relationship with Castro, who often invited him to long nighttime discussions, baseball games, fishing trips and other expeditions; he was often accompanied by John Nolan, another lawyer loyal to Kennedy. Donovan and Nolan contributed to the resumption of relations between Kennedy and Castro, but in their last trip to Cuba in April 1963, Helms, with the aid of Dr. Gottlieb, arranged for Donovan and Nolan to bring a gift for Castro — an avid scubadiver — a diving suit contaminated with a fungus known to cause chronic skin disease. In 1975, Donovan and Nolan would learn through the findings of the Church Committee, that the CIA had tried to make them commit a political assassination without their knowledge. Why the poison within the suit had not taken effect remains unknown.


Meanwhile, the armed groups of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA tried to poison relations between the U.S. and the Castro government. The most active of these groups was called Alpha 66; it was led by Antonio Veciana and overseen by David Atlee Phillips, which, according to Veciana, “kept saying Kennedy would have to be forced to make a decision, and the only way was to put him up against the wall”. From October 1962, Alpha 66 staged raids along the Cuban coast, attacking both commercial and military Russian ships and leaving dozens dead. On the 19th of March 1963, the group announced they had attacked a Russian ship off the coast of Cuba, with the aim, Veciana would explain,  “to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro”. Kennedy responded by ordering the Florida Coast Guard to intercept the raids and seize the boats. He further cut funds going to the Cuban Revolutionary Council, lowering the $2 million to less than one. The head of the Council, Jose Miro Cardona, complained in protest to the New York Times that “the struggle for Cuba was in the process of being liquidated by the Government”. Yet again, the Cuban exile community acted as though they were a foreign power seeking to draw the United States into a war for their own account.


During this time, Kennedy sought to restore diplomatic ties with Castro while remaining discrete within a growing atmosphere of paranoid anticommunism. He made the most of his relations among journalists, a profession he practiced before entering politics. He asked Lisa Howard, a TV host who had interviewed Fidel Castro and was close to Che Guevara, to arrange a quiet meeting between Carlos Lechuga, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, and William Attwood, a former journalist who had also met Castro in 1959, before being promoted by Kennedy as a diplomat to the United Nations. The first informal meeting at Howard’s residence on September 23rd 1963, led to the idea of a meeting between Castro and Attwood in Cuba: the project would be aborted by the death of Kennedy.


Kennedy also called upon French journalist Jean Daniel, founder of the Nouvel Observateur. Learning that Daniel planned go to Cuba to interview Castro, Kennedy invited him to the White House October 24th: officially to give him an interview, unofficially to ask him to be his messenger to Castro. In his message, Kennedy expressed not only his desire for reconciliation, but furthermore his empathy for the people of Cuba: “I believe that there is no country in the world, […] where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. […] I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins”. While Daniel waited in Cuba for Castro’s consent to grant him an interview, Kennedy sent the latter an indirect message on November 18th 1963, saying in a speech to the Inter-American Press Association in Miami, that he was ready “to work with the Cuban people in pursuit of those progressive goals which a few short years ago stirred their hopes and the sympathy of many people throughout the hemisphere”. The next day, November 19th at 10 PM, Castro rushed to Daniel’s hotel for an interview that would last until four o'clock in the morning. Castro responded enthusiastically to Kennedy’s message of sympathy: “He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest president of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas”. Daniel was having lunch with Castro the next day when they were interrupted with news of the assassination. “Everything is changed”, commented Castro, dejectedly. “You watch and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing”. Like clockwork, the radio would soon announce that the culprit was a “pro-Castro Marxist”.


In light of all available evidence, reputed authors such as David Talbot and James Douglass agree that the Kennedy assassination was an undercover coup orchestrated by a clan of generals and executed by CIA, with the active cooperation of Cuban exiles. For his commitment to restraint and disarmament and for his determination to further diplomacy and dialogue with Khrushchev and Castro, Kennedy was perceived by war mongers not only as a weak link in the chain of command, but also as a traitor in collusion with the enemy. Whoever fired the shots on Deley Plaza, the CIA had plenty of choice for both hit men and Cuban exile volunteers who believed that the United States owed them a “debt of blood” from the Bay of Pigs. Among the organizers of the operation, Richard Helms, the head of the Directorate of Plans, is the prime suspect. But Allen Dulles, his mentor, is not far behind, especially given his leadership of the Warren Committee cover-up, and suspicion falls of course on the other two ejected from the CIA by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs: Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell. Jim Garrison had intended to charge Cabell with conspiracy, but gave up for lack of evidence. It is noteworthy that Charles’s brother, Earl Cabell, was at the time the mayor of Dallas and thus had the means to facilitate the ambush against Kennedy. The CIA had the means and the motive for the assassination: coups d’états and political assassinations are its specialty.


It is not trivial that precisely one month after Kennedy’s assassination, on December 22nd 1963, former President Harry Truman published an editorial in the Washington Post titled “U.S. Should Hold CIA to Intelligence”, in which he said he was “disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government”. “I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations”, and at the point of becoming across the globe “a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue […] there are now some searching questions that need to be answered”. The article appeared in the morning edition, and subsequently disappeared from those following. No other newspaper made comment. This silence only confirms the serious implications of the message, which, given the timing, can be read as indicting the CIA for its complicity in the Kennedy assassination. As author Ray Marcus says,  “If that wasn’t what he meant, then I can’t imagine he would have written and/or released it then for fear of having it read that way”.

Richard Helms’s biographer Thomas Powers calls him The Man Who Kept the Secret, and defines him as a “gentlemanly planner of assassinations”. Helms supervised the MK-ULTRA research into mind-control, and destroyed nearly all record of it in 1975. Convicted of lying under oath in front of Congress, he received a suspended sentence of two years in prison, but then was awarded the National Security Medal by Ronald Reagan. Brazilian journalist Claudia Furiati, author of ZR Rifle, sees him as the ultimate author of Kennedy’s assassination. He rests, like Kennedy, in Arlington National Cemetery.

After the assassination of Kennedy, journalist Lisa Howard refused to cut her contacts with Castro, despite CIA threat. In December 1964, she has a long conversation with Guevara at the United Nations. In a top-secret memorandum, her former contact at the CIA, Gordon Chase, mentioned the necessity “remove Lisa from direct participation” in dealings with Cuba. She was fired from ABC News and died on the 4th of July 1965, at 33, officially by suicide, after having swallowed a hundred pills of Phenobarbital.

CIA agent David Sanchez Morales, in 1959. Of Mexican origin and nicknamed El Indio, he gained the reputation of chief assassin in Guatemala during the operation against Arbenz, before participating in the training of the Cuban exiles as chief of JW/WAVE unit. After his retirement in 1975, alcoholism made him dangerously talkative. Speaking of Kennedy, for example, he confided to his friend Ruben Carbajal, “Well, we took care of that SOB, didn’t we?” In May 1978, as he was scheduled to testify in front of the HSCA, he came back sick from a reunion with former colleagues and died within a week. No autopsy was performed.

"a red pill for Forrest Gump"​ ​ 

50 YEARS OF DEEP STATE

from Kennedy to 9/11

(comparison & perspective)  

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