Dick Helms always insisted that the AMLASH operation was a not, repeat not, an assassination conspiracy. He denied it, under oath, to Senate and House investigators. He repeated the claim in his memoir. “The AMLASH operation was a political action operation to get a political grouping together to unseat Castro,” he said. “It was not an assassination operation. It was not designed for that purpose. I think I do know what I’m talking about here.”1
Helms certainly did know what he was talking about, he just wasn’t sharing all that he knew. By the summer of 1963, the deputy director was well briefed on AMLASH. He knew about Cubela, the assassination of Colonel Blanco Rico, and the battle of Santa Clara. The Agency knew of Cubela’s passionate defense of the revolution while serving as president of the student body at the University of Havana, the same position once held by his martyred friend José Antonio Echeverría. Cubela’s leadership gave the government de facto control of a campus that had traditionally been autonomous and a hotbed of antigovernment activism.2
As a hero of the revolution, Cubela was an attractive target for recruitment. He told friends that he loathed what Castro’s government was doing to Cuba. The CIA men knew he wasn’t a communist. They just didn’t know how to approach him. Tony Sforza, a deep-cover agent, recommended contacting Carlos Tepedino, a jeweler in Havana, who had given Sforza safe haven while he was being hunted by Castro’s security forces. Tepedino had also given money to the Revolutionary Directorate in the fight against Batista, and was personally close to Cubela.
“In view of the many years of friendship we have had with Subject’s [Tepedino’s] family,” one station asset wrote, “we can his assure that his family [is] absolutely trustworthy and are willing to give any type of help.” Sforza’s suggestion paid off. When contacted, Tepedino agreed to arrange a meeting with Cubela in Helsinki, Finland, where they were attending an international youth conference.3
In the dim confines of a Helsinki restaurant called the White Lady, Cubela told the visiting CIA officer, “If he could do something really significant for the creation of a new Cuba, he was interested in returning to carry on the fight there.” And what did “really significant” mean? the CIA man asked. “To eliminate Fidel, by execution if necessary,” Cubela replied.
That’s why Helms regarded Cubela as the best hope for getting rid of Castro. “Given the relentless blistering heat from the White House,” he explained in his memoir, “I was scarcely of a mind to drop anyone whom we were satisfied had a reasonable access to Castro and who was apparently determined to turn him out of office.”4
Helms’s determination to kill Castro was tested in August 1963 when the story of the now-abandoned Mafia plots emerged for the first time. The Chicago Sun-Times published a story under the headline: “CIA Sought Giancana for Cuba Spying.”5 The story detailed contacts between CIA officers and the Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana in the fall of 1960. It did not mention the poison pills or assassination, but given Giancana’s murderous reputation, the implication was there.
McCone called Helms. “What’s this about?”
The deputy director brought McCone a memorandum for the record about the CIA’s meeting with Attorney General Bob Kennedy in May 1962. It memorialized the story of how the Agency approached Giancana with poison pills, how Bob Maheu blackmailed the government into dropping charges against him, and how Bob Kennedy reacted.6 McCone scanned the memo rather quickly, Helms observed. This was a sensitive subject. McCone was a devout Catholic who abhorred the idea of assassination, at least on Sundays. It was a Friday, so he chose not to make an issue of it. “This did not happen on my tenure,” McCone said, looking up.
Helms took advantage of his forbearance with a dose of guile. “There’s only one copy of this memorandum in the building,” he said. “I don’t think it should be in your office. I would like to take it with me.”7 Helms took the incriminating paper and exited.
There was a method to his neatness. Helms and his CIA colleagues understood and emphasized the importance of the historical record, observed Thomas Powers, Helms’s biographer. They had a sure answer to the philosopher’s query, if a tree falls in the woods without a witness, does it make any sound? “The CIA would say no,” Powers observed. “It would agree with historian David Hackett Fischer. History is not what happened but what the surviving evidence says happened. If you can hide the evidence and keep the secrets, then you can write the history.”8 Helms didn’t merely believe that. He lived it.
A few days later, Helms sent a copy of the Sun-Times article to Bob Kennedy with a cover note saying the piece “was brought to my attention today for the first time, so I was unaware of its appearance when I talked with you Monday afternoon.” That sounded true but was not. Helms had discussed the article with McCone the day it came out. That was three days before he shared it with RFK. Helms’s fib fit his method. If you can hide the evidence and keep the secrets, then you can write the history.
The AMLASH conspiracy proceeded. The partisan politics of the Cuba issue had quieted since the missile crisis. The talk of war in Cuba, prevalent in the fall of 1962, was muted after the dreadful scare of the October crisis. The president wanted calm. The chief voice for Cuba action in the White House, Bob Kennedy, was preoccupied with bitter resistance to court-ordered desegregation of the Jim Crow South. While the Pentagon and the CIA wanted action in Cuba, Kennedy wanted quiet. He kept open the option of negotiating with Castro, a disturbing development to the Cuba hawks.
Helms nurtured his plan to eliminate Castro. In September 1963, he sent Nestor Sanchez to meet Cubela on the sidelines of a sports festival in Brazil. As a representative of the Cuban government, he was a well-known figure. His first-person account of the Battle of Santa Clara had just been published as a cover story in Bohemia, Cuba’s leading news magazine. On the fourth anniversary of the revolution, he and Guevara were depicted as comrades in arms. Yet Cubela was so disillusioned he continued talking to the enemy, the CIA.
Sanchez got right to the point. If Cubela wanted to move against Castro, he could offer U.S. support. Cubela reiterated that he would only act on behalf of the most serious effort. They agreed to meet again. Ten days later, Cubela turned up in Paris with a severe case of cold feet.9 Helms sent Sanchez to buck him up. Cubela responded by saying he wanted to meet a senior U.S. official, preferably Robert Kennedy, to confirm Washington’s support as he risked his life for their cause.
Cubela’s request bothered Harold Swenson, the top counterintelligence officer in the Cuba operation. Swenson was a former FBI agent who devoted hours to studying the personnel and methods of Castro’s spy service. “I felt first that we were dealing with people whose bona fides were subject to question,” he said.10 He thought they should cut off contact with AMLASH. Helms overruled Swenson. He sent his top Cuba deputy, Desmond FitzGerald, to Paris to meet with Cubela. FitzGerald introduced himself as “James Clark,” the personal emissary of Robert Kennedy, which wasn’t true. In another display of guile, Helms had asked FitzGerald not to disclose the mission to RFK.
It is a tribute to Helms’s immense charm that, in the face of a paper trail studded with words like “eliminate” and “execution,” punctuated by the delivery of two weapons to a man who would later be convicted of an assassination conspiracy, and corroborated by sworn testimony of CIA officers, Helms still managed to convince two competent biographers and his worldly wife that AMLASH was not really an assassination operation.
“When people wanted to invade Cuba or kill Castro, his attitude was, ‘Oh, God,’” Helms biographer Thomas Powers told Chris Whipple, author of a laudatory book about CIA directors. “He just was so against it all,” said Cynthia Helms of the plots to kill Castro. “He said to me one day, ‘I was never going to do it. We were never going to do it.’ But they made his life miserable over it.”11
The CIA’s files betray no trace of Helms’s putative resistance to the lure of assassination. In August 1962 the Agency’s reporting on Cubela in Helsinki made it clear AMLASH was serious about assassination. In July 1963 Helms approved renewed contact. In August 1963, he chose not to disclose the operation to McCone, a man with moral objections to assassination. The next month he selected the trusted Nestor Sanchez to handle AMLASH. When Cubela lost his nerve in Paris, Helms sent Sanchez to hold his hand. When Cubela wanted to meet a senior American official, Helms dispatched FitzGerald. And when Swenson questioned Cubela’s bona fides, Helms dismissed his concerns and delivered a lethal weapon. In this chain of events, no one but Dick Helms was in charge, and his purpose was plain: assassinating Fidel Castro.
Nixon, out of politics and far from the policy action, was pursuing his intricately plotted route back to the White House. In May 1963, he agreed to join the Mudge Rose law firm in New York in a public partner position that would allow him to combine legal work with politicking.12 Before starting his new job, he and his family left for a long-planned tour of Europe. In Paris, Nixon arranged a lunch with President de Gaulle, whose career now served as a template for the down-and-out former vice president.13 De Gaulle had led the French nation through World War II and then was sidelined by lesser politicians. Nixon had risen to great heights in the Eisenhower administration and then been cheated, or so he believed, by the Kennedys and their establishment allies. In political exile, de Gaulle cultivated his contacts and sharpened his message until the force of his ideas returned him to power. Nixon planned to do the same.
Upon his return Nixon took up the life of a working attorney, dutiful dad, and doting husband. Each day his driver and house servant, Manolo Sanchez, delivered him to the law firm offices at 20 Broad Street by eight thirty in the morning. Nixon found New York exciting and cutthroat. “Any person tends to vegetate unless he is moving on a fast track,” he explained to a reporter. “You have to bone up to keep alive in the competition here.”14
Nixon simplified his life. He dissolved his political office, sending his chief of staff Bob Haldeman back to California while retaining Rose Woods as his secretary. Now a face in the Gotham crowd, Nixon dedicated himself to business and the law. Journalist Theodore White thought he looked wiser. “The lines on his face from nose to chin, the cheek folds themselves, were deeper, more furrowed,” White wrote. “Yet the more mature man seemed more attractive, less harsh than the man of 1960.”15
Nixon did not—could not—abstain from politics. In October 1963, he returned from an overseas trip and unburdened himself to reporters about President Kennedy’s much-touted “image,” which had him riding high in the polls and low in Nixon’s estimation. “I have never been abroad when American prestige was lower than it is now,” he said.16 Even in retirement, he was ready with a barb, alert for an opportunity to score points. And when events in Southeast Asia gave him an opening, he attacked Kennedy again.
Dick Helms was a man of many meetings—about budgets, personnel, and operations—where he dealt with questions, large and small. He paid attention to personalities, collected intelligence voraciously, and kept the interests of the president in mind. When Howard Hunt wanted to bring wife Dorothy into the spying profession, the deputy director liked the idea. Dorothy, working as a translator for the Spanish ambassador in Washington, was well positioned to learn about Spain’s intentions toward the United States. Hunt proposed that Dorothy be hired as a contract employee. The Office of Security objected. Hunt “has been a continuing security problem due to disregard for regulations and established procedures,” one official warned.
Dorothy spied anyway. In February 1963, she filched a letter from the ambassador to a friend of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, asking for help in securing a presidential visit to Spain. The ambassador wanted to talk about U.S. policy in Latin America with Kennedy. Howard passed his wife’s report to the chief of foreign intelligence, who showed it to the deputy director. Helms thought the information worthy of White House attention.
“Mrs. Hunt is engaging in intelligence collection in the United States—without any official sanction for such activity,” complained another official. Helms dismissed the objection via his deputy. “We believe that there is sufficient gain from the contact and certain pieces of information to take the calculated risk,” Karamessines told the Office of Security. Dorothy continued to spy on the Spanish ambassador until June 1963, when she gave birth to the Hunts’ fourth child, David. Helms, the manager, showed a deft touch. He took care of his pal’s wife.17
Punctual and attentive, Helms sat through many country briefings. On the analytical side he presided over the editing of formal National Intelligence Estimates that the White House and the National Security Council constantly demanded. Operationally, he administered an annual budget of a billion dollars, employing some 15,000 people. He kept current on covert activities in some eighty countries. Which minister was on the payroll? Whose phone was tapped? Who could be blackmailed? Who could help with a break-in? Who could make a communist disappear? Helms presided over a vast empire of coercion and deception in service of the Free World.
The deputy director scheduled the most time for meetings on the secret wars in Cuba, Laos, and increasingly South Vietnam, where communist forces were gaining on the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. After he and Julia visited Saigon on a trip in 1962, Helms came away favoring expanded covert operations and enhanced military assistance. He envisioned the CIA serving as the cutting edge of U.S. forces fighting a land war against a totalitarian power, like the OSS did in World War II. When Julia met Madame Nhu, wife of Diem’s interior minister and de facto First Lady of South Vietnam, she was struck by Nhu’s disdain for her own country.18 Helms sensed Diem’s independence was a problem.
Diem had been elected president of South Vietnam in 1956 in an election in which all opposition candidates were banned. His political strength derived from his resistance to the Japanese occupation during World War II and his refusal to collaborate with the French colonialists afterward. He embodied a Vietnamese nationalism that was not communist, so the U.S. government held him up as an exemplar of the Free World. Diem also enjoyed the support of the Catholic Church in the United States, not the least because his government favored the country’s Catholic minority over the Buddhist majority.19
“It became apparent irrespective of U.S. counsel and support, Diem was determined to go his own way,” Helms wrote in his memoir. In May the Diem government ordered Buddhist flags celebrating the upcoming birthday of the Buddha to be taken down. Only religious institutions could have flags, the government said, and Buddhism was a religion, not an institution. When the Buddhists protested. Diem’s brother, Interior Minister Ngo Dinh Nhu, violently suppressed their demonstrations. One Buddhist monk responded by burning himself to death on a busy Saigon street, and the ghastly photograph was seen around the world. By the end of the summer, six more monks had immolated themselves in protest.20 Nhu’s beautiful and imperious wife, who served as a First Lady for the bachelor president, blurted out that she would “clap for another monk’s barbecue,” ensuring her reputation as a twentieth-century Marie Antoinette.21 As an ally, Diem had disappointed Kennedy too many times.
In August 1963, Kennedy came around to the idea of letting Diem’s rivals in Saigon know that Washington would not object to a coup. He approved the idea in a conversation with Henry Cabot Lodge, the former senator and Nixon’s running mate in 1960, whom he had just appointed ambassador in Saigon. “The time may come, though, we’ve got to just have to do something about Diem,” Kennedy said in a White House tape recording first made public in 2020, “and I think that’s going to be an awfully critical period.” Warned that Diem and Nhu might well be killed in a coup. Kennedy was more concerned that they be replaced. “It may be they ought to go,” he said, “but it’s just a question of how quickly that’s done and if you get the right fellow.”22
The president polled his advisers to weigh in. The CIA’s chief of station in Saigon opposed the idea of a coup, saying Diem should be given time. The newly married John McCone was on his honeymoon, so Helms was called at his home on Fessenden Street in northwest Washington. He supported Kennedy’s decision. “It’s about time we bit that bullet,” he said, according to journalist David Halberstam.23 The coup plotters held off, fearing Diem might be laying a trap. Under pressure to increase U.S. military support for the embattled regime, Kennedy resisted sending more troops while signaling again in late October that he would welcome a new government.
JFK got what he wished for. On November 1, a cabal of generals in the Armed Forces of South Vietnam, led by Duong Van Minh, known as Big Minh, decided Diem had to go. Minh’s troops besieged the presidential palace in Saigon. Diem and Nhu tried and failed to rally their supporters in the armed forces. Finding none willing to act, they slipped out of the palace and took refuge in a nearby church. They sent word to Minh they were ready to surrender in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Minh ordered his men to pick up Diem and Nhu and deliver them to the U.S. military headquarters, where the CIA was arranging a flight out of the country.
One of Minh’s lieutenants, Captain Thung, took Diem and Nhu into custody, handcuffed them, and secured them in an army personnel carrier. En route to the American headquarters, the captain stopped the truck and flung open the doors to the vehicle in a rage. He started slashing the handcuffed Diem and Nhu with his bayonet. While they were still alive, he cut open their stomachs and extracted their gall bladders, considered trophies of war. With his bloody victory in hand, Thung pulled out his pistol and shot both men dead.24
Back in Washington, Kennedy blanched when he heard the news in a meeting with his national security advisers. Diem was a friend of his father’s, a gentle man he’d known all his adult life. Kennedy jumped up and left the room. “I’ve never seen him more upset,” said Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.25 Helms was not impressed. The coup was Kennedy’s idea. What did he expect? JFK had “never quite hoisted this operation aboard,” he said, meaning he had never taken full responsibility for his own policy. In Helms’s view, Kennedy wasn’t quite in charge.
Nixon thought worse, that Kennedy had blundered badly, again, and he relished the opportunity for attack politics. Diem’s fate could serve as ammunition in the 1964 campaign. Nixon sent a note to Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon. Lodge epitomized the Eastern Establishment that Nixon envied and challenged and hoped to join.26 To address Lodge was to address American power itself.
“I could tell from news reports how frustrated you must have been by the obstinacy of Diem, his brother, Madame Nhu and their associates,” Nixon wrote. “But the heavy-handed participation of the United States in the coup which lead inevitably to the charge that we were either partially responsible for, or at the very least, condoned the murder of Diem and his brother, has left a bad taste in the mouths of many Americans…”
Nixon’s relentless intelligence homed in on the opportunity to blame Kennedy for the deaths of Diem and Nhu. As in the Bay of Pigs operation, the president had demonized and abandoned an American ally. That was a message that could get through to voters everywhere and put him in the White House. “This may not seem important now,” Nixon told Lodge, “but I don’t need to tell you, the villains of today may become the martyrs of tomorrow.”27
For Helms the news from Cuba was no better than it was from Vietnam. On November 6, the deputy director reported to the 303 Committee, the interagency group that reviewed covert operations. A recent sabotage mission on the island had proved a total failure, he said. Cuban security anticipated the raid and routed the attackers. Castro was growing stronger, U.S. policy more ineffectual. At the next week’s meeting, on November 13, Helms was pleased to hear the discussion come around to Castro’s support for revolutionaries throughout the hemisphere. The sense of the meeting was that something had to be done to generate support for a more aggressive policy. “The CIA, in connection with Department of Defense, should concentrate on attempting to catch Castro red-handed delivering arms to communist groups in Latin American countries,” said the minutes of the meeting.28
That was a request Helms could fulfill in short order. The CIA had been monitoring Havana’s support for revolutionaries in Venezuela, he claimed in his memoir. “An agent informed us that Castro operatives were about to land some three tons of small arms, ammunition, and mortars on the Venezuelan coast,” he wrote in his memoir.29 The Agency, it seems, had caught the Cubans “red-handed.”
Or did they? Six months earlier, the Agency had developed a deception operation to fake a communist arms shipment. The plan, according to a May 1963 memo, involved “the laying down of an arms cache containing Soviet, Czech, and ChiCom [Chinese Communist] arms in selected Latin America areas, ostensibly proving the arms were smuggled from Cuba.” When the 303 Committee resolved to find an arms cache, Helms provided one within the week. Historian David Kaiser suggested “the cache may have been a plant, the execution of a long discussed plan,” a disinformation operation against the president himself to create pressure for a tougher Cuba policy.30
The Cuba issue was deeply felt by the CIA men. Helms, often reluctant to express policy views, did not hesitate on Cuba. He was an adamant advocate. Kennedy needed to act. Now.
“Castro’s scheme was a clear violation of the policy agreement that followed the missile crisis,” Helms wrote, “and came almost exactly a year after the press conference in which President Kennedy had pledged peace in the Caribbean, if all offensive weapons were removed from Cuba, and (emphasis in original) if Cuba ceased attempting to export its aggressive communist objectives.”
Helms felt so strongly about the issue that he went to Bob Kennedy’s office at the Justice Department to make his case, bringing with him one of the guns the Agency had supposedly seized. The impulsive attorney general, feeling guilty that he hadn’t done enough on Cuba, said they should tell the president right away. Half an hour later, JFK was looking at a gun in the Oval Office.
Helms thought the scene worth recording in all its chilly detail.
“When the meeting ended, the President arose from his rocking chair and stood beside the coffee table looking toward the Rose Garden,” he recalled. “I leaned over and took the submachine gun from the coffee table and slipped it back into the canvas airline travel bag in which we carried it—unchallenged—from the parking lot to the President’s office. As the President turned to shake hands, I said, ‘I’m sure glad the Secret Service didn’t catch us bringing this gun in here.’”
Helms was a subtle man making a pitiless point. Did Kennedy, in his last days of life, appreciate that his Cuba policy was a matter of life and death? Apparently not. “The President’s expression brightened,” Helms recalled. “He grinned, shook his head slightly, and said, ‘Yes, it gives me a feeling of confidence.’”31
The deputy director worked in a deadly milieu. The next day, Helms received the latest report from Nestor Sanchez on AMLASH. Cubela was satisfied by his recent meeting with Des FitzGerald but “could not understand why he was denied certain small pieces of equipment, which promised a final solution to the problem.”32 Helms promptly fulfilled Cubela’s request. He called on Dr. Edward Gunn, the chemist who concocted the poison pills for Castro’s consumption. On short order, Gunn manufactured a hypodermic syringe disguised as a fountain pen that could be loaded with poison. Helms sent the lethal device to Sanchez in Paris.
On November 22, 1963, Sanchez welcomed Cubela into the secure apartment of a CIA colleague in Paris. Cubela said he was returning to Cuba fully determined to initiate a coup against AMTHUG [the CIA’s unsubtle codename for Castro]. He named ten government officials who could be trusted to join the plot, and another five military commanders who would “fall in line” once the coup was successful. Sanchez was encouraged. He thought Cubela’s operational thinking “appeared much less foggy than before.” When Sanchez handed over Dr. Gunn’s lethal writing instrument, Cubela returned it, saying it was useless. Cubela demanded a cache of heavy weaponry, including hand grenades and high-powered Belgian-made FAL rifles with scopes.
Helms had to forever deny the lethal nature of the AMLASH operation because of another event that day. When Cubela and Sanchez emerged from the meeting in the early evening, a passerby asked them if they had heard the news from Dallas.33