November 22, 1963: Even as the open limousine
carrying President John F. Kennedy was moving into the cross-hairs
of an assassin aiming a rifle with telescopic sights in
Dallas, a high-ranking CIA official in Paris, representing
himself as the emissary of Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
was delivering to a Cuban assassin the weapons to kill Castro.
The assassin was Major Rolando Cubela,
a close associate of Castro's who worked without portfolio
in the Havana government. He had contacted the CIA and volunteered
to eliminate Castro, asking specifically for "a high-powered
rifle with telescopic sights that could be used to kill
Castro from a distance." The CIA official was Desmond FitzGerald,
chief of the Special Affairs Section (SAS), the covert unit
responsible for orchestrating the overthrow of Castro. He
was accompanied at the meeting by Cubela's CIA case officer.
They gave Cubela a fountain pen with a hidden needle, capable
of injecting lethal Blackleaf 40 toxin into a victim without
his knowledge. FitzGerald explained that the rifle with
telescopic sights would be delivered to Cubela inside Cuba.
But the CIA's counterintelligence staff,
under the legendary James Jesus Angleton, had had concerns
about Cubela's provenance prior to November 22nd, the counterintelligence
officer working under FitzGerald, had warned that the operation
was "insecure." And in September, only hours after Cubela
had first broached, in Brazil, the idea of assassinating
the Cuban leader, Castro had given an extraordinary interview
to an American reporter in Havana, saying he knew the American
government was behind plots to kill him and ominously warning
he would "answer in kind" any attempts. So in the parallax
universe of deception, it was a distinct possibility that
Cubela was an agent provocateur, testing the CIA on behalf
of Castro. If so, in working with Cubela, FitzGerald had
inadvertently given Castro evidence of the involvement of
the highest echelon of American government in the assassination
plots.
As we now know, Castro's fear of American
assassination plots was well founded. Subsequent investigations
by the CIA's Inspector General (1967) and the Church Committee
(1975) uncovered at least eight separate murder plots against
Castro, beginning in the summer of 1960, the halcyon days
of the Eisenhower Administration. Initially, when 32-year
old Fidel Castro had won power in Cuba in 1959 and toured
America in triumph, there was hope in Washington that he
was a democratic reformer. But by mid-1960, after he had
nationalized foreign property in Cuba, U.S. intelligence
concluded that he was a Communist, allied with Moscow in
the Cold War. At the CIA, planning for an American-led invasion
of Cuba was already underway.
As part of its contingency planning,
the CIA assigned Colonel Sheffield Edwards, thedirector
of its office of security, to arrange less expensive ways
of getting rid of Castro by assassination. Edwards approached
an ex-FBI agent, Robert Maheu, who had worked with him in
the past on CIA counterespionage investigations, including
black bag break-ins, unauthorized wiretaps, and other covert
operations. He told Maheu there was $150,000 available for
Castro's assassination. Maheu suggested John Roselli, a
Mafioso who recruited his two mob bosses, Sam Giancana from
Chicago and Santo Traficante from New Orleans. The advantage
to employing the Mafia for this sensitive mission, aside
from the mob's contacts in the Cuban underworld, was providing
the CIA with credible cover. If the assassins were killed
or captured, it would seem plausible to the public that
the Mafia had ordered the "hit" because Castro had taken
away its brothels, casinos, and other enterprises in Havana.
In return, by cooperating with the CIA, the three Mafiosi
got protection against FBI investigations into their domestic
criminal enterprises.
Rosselli proposed a simple plan: through
its underworld connections in Cuba, the Mafia would recruit
a Cuban in Castro's entourage, such as a waiter or bodyguard,
who would poison Castro. The CIA's Technical Services Division,
informally known as its "workshop," was given the job of
producing and testing on monkeys an untraceable poison.
It came up with a botulinus toxin that the CIA's Office
of Medical Services then injected into Castro's favorite
brand cigars. It also produced simpler botulinus toxin pills
that could be dissolved in his food or drink. But the deputized
Mafia contacts failed to deliver any of the poisons to Castro.
As Rosselli explained to the CIA, the first poisoner had
been discharged from Castro's employ before he could kill
him, while a back-up agent got "cold feet."
While the Mafia continued its unsuccessful
machinations, John F. Kennedy became President and, in April
1961, launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, an attack on a
swamp in Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles that ended in
disaster. Furious at this humiliating failure, Kennedy summoned
Richard Bissell, the head of the CIA's covert operations,
to the Cabinet Room and chided him for "sitting on his ass
and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro and the
Castro regime" (as Bissell recalled). Richard Helms, who
succeeded Bissell, also felt "white heat," as he put it,
from the Kennedys to get rid of Castro.
By then, the Kennedys had set up their
own covert structure for dealing with the Castro problem
the Special Group Augmented, which Attorney General Robert
Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor effectively ran and which,
in November 1961, launched a secret war against the Castro
regime, codenamed Operation Mongoose. Secretary of Defense
Robert Strange McNamara, who was not a formal member of
this group but attended meetings, later testified: "We were
hysterical about Castro at about the time of the Bay of
Pigs and thereafter. And there was pressure from JFK and
RFK to do something about Castro." It was a "no holds barred"
enterprise, as Helms termed it, for which the Special Group
Augmented assigned such "planning tasks" as using biological
and chemical warfare against Cuban sugar workers; employing
Cuban gangsters to kill Cuban police officials, Soviet bloc
technicians, and other targeted people; using agents to
sabotage mines; and, in what was called Operation Bounty,
paying cash bonuses of up to $100,000 for the murder or
abduction of government officials.
It was in this heightened atmosphere
that the Richard Bissell turned to a super-secret, codenamed
ZR/RIFLE, which was meant to give the CIA to on-demand "executive
action" capacity that could be used against defectors and,
as a "last resort," could be used to assassinate foreign
leaders. The head of this program was William "Two Gun"
Harvey, who had proved himself a dedicated hands-on cold
warrior as the CIA station chief in Berlin in 1960. For
the Castro assignment, he was instructed by Bissell to work
through Rosselli, who was still believed to have underworld
agents inside Cuba, and finally put ZR/RIFLE to the test
by killing Castro.
Harvey had a serious security problem,
however, with Rosselli's two associates, Maheu and Giancana.
They had invited the unwanted attention of the FBI by citing
their CIA connection to block an unrelated criminal investigation
into a wiretap Giancana had planted in a girlfriend's hotel
room in Las Vegas. Through this intervention, J. Edgar Hoover
learned about their "dirty business" in Havana. Compromising
this sensitive operation even further, Hoover also found
out that another girlfriend of Giancana's named Judith Campbell
Exner was also a girlfriend of President Kennedy's during
this period. Hoover then briefed Attorney General Kennedy
on the Mafia-CIA liaison as well as the more personal liaison
between Exner and the President. And on April 10, 1962,
Hoover wrote a memo for the files that Kennedy told him
that the CIA had briefed him that it had retained Maheu
to offer Giancana "$150,000 to hire some gunmen to go into
Cuba and to kill Castro." Although this maneuver by Hoover
greatly vitiated the possibility of total deniability for
the Attorney General, it mentioned only Maheu and Giancana,
not Rosselli. So the plan could proceed.
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