59
Complicity of Anti-Castro Cubans
Manuel Rodriguez Quesada and Gilberto Rodriguez Hernandez
Rodriguez Quesada was a bodyguard of a major exile leader, Rolando “El Tigre” Masferrer, a man with an army—Los Tigres—that was ready and willing to fight Castro.
Rodriguez Hernandez was a military coordinator for the Cuban government-in-exile groups.
A professional assassin used by U.S. intelligence—John O’Hare—reportedly said that he was ordered to kill both Rodriguez Quesada and Rodriguez Hernandez because of exile leader Eladio del Valle’s fear that they would expose the identities of those responsible for the JFK assassination.
O’Hare reportedly killed them both.605
Angel and Leopoldo
Richard Case Nagell, the military intelligence spy who was tracking Lee Harvey Oswald’s movements before the assassination, figured out that Oswald was being deceived into believing he was working in an intelligence operation with pro-Castro agents. In reality, Nagell learned, they were involved in anti-Castro intelligence operations, but Oswald refused to believe it when confronted with the information by Nagell.
Nagell knew the two Cuban agents only by their “war names” (false names for intelligence operations)—which were “Angel” and “Leopoldo”— but it is believed they may have been two dangerous commandos from the aggressively anti-Castro exile group, Alpha 66.
Cuban exiles using those same “war names” showed up on the Dallas doorstep of Silvia Odio in late September of 1963. They were accompanied by a quiet young American who they introduced as “Leon Oswald.” Fortyeight hours later, “Leopoldo” telephoned Odio and asked what she thought of “Leon.” She remembered “Leopoldo” saying:
He’s kind of loco kind of nuts. He could go either way. He could do anything—like getting underground in Cuba, like killing Castro. The American says we Cubans don’t have any guts. He says we should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. He says we should do something like that.
But Silvia Odio’s testimony before the Warren Commission was dismissed because the commission had already concluded Oswald was on his way to Mexico City at the time he supposedly showed up at her door.606 Well, Oswald’s “double” was either at Odio’s door to set him up, or in Mexico City visiting the Soviet/Cuban embassies, also to set him up.
Tony Cuesta, Eladio del Valle and Herminio Diaz Garcia
Tony Cuesta was a founding member of Alpha 66, a highly combative paramilitary exile group that hated Castro with a vengeance. Cuesta was taken prisoner after a failed covert operation into Cuba in 1966.
When his team was captured, Cuesta pulled the pin on a grenade in a final attempt to take out his Cuban enemies and was blinded and lost a hand. Cuesta then spent many years in a Cuban prison, and his political positions softened somewhat as he grew older.
Years later, Cuesta actually admitted his participation in the JFK assassination—personally—to Fabian Escalante, head of Cuban Counterintelligence. Cuesta also reportedly provided Escalante with a voluntarily written declaration to that effect, which also stated that Cuesta had direct knowledge that two other Cuban exiles—Eladio del Valle and Herminio Diaz Garcia—also were involved in plotting the assassination of President Kennedy.607
Diaz Garcia was a hired killer who had been a bodyguard for Santo Trafficante and also worked for Tony Varona.608 He died in combat during a raid into Cuba in 1966.
Eladio del Valle was a brutal exile leader who was brutally murdered himself in Florida. He was known to have links to Florida Godfather Santo Trafficante, himself a key suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy.609 In addition to being named as a conspirator in the JFK assassination by Tony Cuesta, a friend of del Valle’s also claimed that del Valle was murdered because of his involvement in the assassination.610
The murder of del Valle was just as he was being sought for testimony by the investigation of District Attorney Jim Garrison. In fact, del Valle was killed the exact same day that another crucial witness, David Ferrie, was found dead under circumstances that Garrison also found suspicious.611
Tony Varona and Rolando Masferrer, Alpha 66
Tony Varona was a loyal supporter of former Cuban President Carlos Prìo Socarrás (the leader overthrown by a military coup just before the Cuban Revolution” see; spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKprio.htm). He worked at efforts to reinstate Prìo Socarrás, which included assassination attempts on Fidel Castro.
Varona worked closely with Prìo Socarrás and another extremely popular exile leader, Manuel Artime. But he also worked closely with mobsters Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante in the CIA-Mafia attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.612
Tony Varona was the key connection for Roselli to hardcore Cuban killers like Herminio Diaz Garcia.613
Colonel C. William Bishop, senior Military member of an elite assassinations unit, told author Dick Russell that, from direct personal knowledge, he could name Varona and Masferrer as conspirators in the JFK assassination:
By 1963, the Cuban element—see, Kennedy had gone to Miami, to the Orange Bowl down there, and made this statement that the brigade’s flag would fly over Cuba and all this crap. That was a stopgap. The exiles for a time believed him. Then shortly after that, a presidential executive order came out that no military-style incursions into Cuba based from the United States would be tolerated. The end result was complete distrust and dislike for Kennedy and his administration by the Cuban exiles. You take Tony Varona and Rolando Masferrer to name but two—and there were many, many more—when serious talk began to happen about the possibility of assassinating Kennedy.614
Rolando Masferrer was a killer with his own private army who was closely associated with mobster Santo Trafficante’s organization and was brought into CIA-Mafia anti-Castro operations by Johnny Roselli and John Martino.615
As Colonel Bishop of the CIA’s Executive Action assassination program put it, in addition to Masferrer being a “key bagman” for the militant Alpha 66 group:
He also had different ties with Jimmy Hoffa. As far back as 1962, I think. But Rolando, from time to time when it came to large sums of money, had sticky fingers. I think that’s why he was killed, eventually. Either that, or the Kennedy assassination. Because he knew about it.616
Masferrer was killed when his car was blown to bits by a very professional car bomb in 1975.
Antonio Veciana
Veciana was the exile leader who founded the extremist anti-Castro group, Alpha 66. He was involved in attempts to kill Castro and testified that the CIA secretly funded some of their military and intelligence operations against Cuba in secret because the Kennedy Administration was in strong opposition to such raids and black ops.617
Veciana’s testimony was also enlightening because he said that he was certain he saw Lee Harvey Oswald with his CIA handler, known to Veciana only by his operational name of Maurice Bishop. Congressional investigators suspected that Maurice Bishop was actually David Phillips, but were never able to prove it completely.618
Manuel Artime
Artime was another popular Cuban exile leader. But in addition to working with the CIA to help try and regain Cuba from Communist control, he was playing both sides of the fence by also working with the Mafia.619
Like many close to the CIA-Mafia plots, Artime died just as he was being sought to testify before a Congressional committee in 1975. He died from rapid-onset cancer but it should be noted that a strain of rapid-onset cancer was being developed in the nexus of anti-Cuban operations to be used as a potential bioweapon against Fidel Castro.620
It’s beyond the realm of coincidence to look at how many witnesses with information about the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro died sudden deaths just as they were about to be pressed by investigators concerning what they knew. That list includes Artime, Rolando Masferrer, David Ferrie, Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, Chuck Nicoletti, George de Mohrenschildt, Carlos Prìo Socarrás, and Eladio del Valle. Others with inside information about those intelligence operations and their apparent link to the JFK assassination were killed before investigators had even figured out who they were: Herminio Diaz Garcia, Manuel Rodriguez Quesada, and Gilbert Rodriguez Hernandez.621
Carlos Prío Socarrás
Prìo Socarrás was President of Cuba from 1948 to 1952. Even though he was “elected” as opposed to being a dictator, his presidency was considered one of the most corrupt eras in Cuban history, with many links to organized crime and political corruption.622
He was involved in the CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation that tried to overthrow Castro and was also linked to two other persons of “keen interest” to the Congressional committee investigating the assassination: mobsters Jack Ruby and Frank Sturgis.623
It was also believed that Prìo Socarrás had relevant information about the JFK assassination, and he was being sought as a witness by Congress. But before he could testify, he died from gunshots outside the garage of his Miami home on April 5, 1977. It was ruled another suicide, but some investigators say that he was murdered to keep him from testifying.624
605 Belzer & Wayne, Hit List, 165–169, citing Robert D. Morrow, First Hand Knowledge (S.P.I. Books: 1992) and Craig Roberts & John Armstrong, JFK: The Dead Witnesses (Consolidated Press: 1994), 98.
606 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 309.
607 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much:
608 John Simkin, “Herminio Diaz Garcia: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, retrieved 25 May 2013: spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKgarciaH.htm
609 Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime (Marlowe & Co.: 1998), 319, 491.
610 Reference Center for Marxist Studies, “Eladio del Valle: Biography,” retrieved 25 May 2013: marxistlibrary.org/eladio-del-valle-biography/
611 Belzer & Wayne, Hit List, 167–179.
612 John Simkin, “Tony Varona: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKvarona.htm
613 Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked.
614 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much,
615 Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice:
616 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 333.
617 John Simkin, “Antonio Veciana: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, retrieved 26 May 2013: spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKveciana.htm
618 Fonzi, The Last Investigation
619 Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice:
620 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey; Baker, Me & Lee.
621 Belzer & Wayne, Hit List, 165–183, 301.
622 Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, 136.
623 John Simkin, “Carlos Prio: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, retrieved 26 May 2013: spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKprio.htm
624 Ibid, citing David Miller, “Did the CIA Kill Carlos Prio.”