NINE

THE BIG JOB

NESTOR SANCHEZ AND ROLANDO CUBELA CONTINUED MEETING in Porto Alegre on and off over four days in early September. They were getting to know each other, though awkwardly. Sanchez was not in disguise but used the alias Nicholas Sanson. He encouraged Cubela to call him Nick. Still, the Cuban was never able to relax with his new case officer, as he had with Weatherby, or to develop genuine rapport.¹

They concentrated on Des FitzGerald’s gnawing priority: the need to identify senior Cuban officers who might rally to a coup. Cubela provided the names of a dozen candidates, but as a rogues’ gallery of potential conspirators, not one among them qualified. They were loyal to the Castros, had little in common, and there was no Cubela sidekick among them prepared to do his bidding. Almost all were desk-bound staff officers. One tough young troop commander, a drinking and carousing friend of Cubela’s, might eventually turn against Fidel. But not yet. He was the same comandante who a month later would eagerly lead the Cuban expeditionary force in Algeria.²

Cubela thought several others were unhappy with the revolution but unwilling to speak up or take confrontational action. Fidel was so feared, Cubela said, it was as if he had supernatural powers. Another unlikely candidate lived in isolation at a ranch where he stayed busy with a kennel of fighting dogs, hoping to avoid politics altogether. One of the better known, José Ramón Fernández, was mistakenly described as anti-communist. But nearly half a century later he was still locked in the Castros’ embrace, serving as a leading member of the Communist Party and a vice president of the council of ministers.

In his debut performance with Sanchez, Cubela had been a disappointment both as prospective coup leader and source of useful intelligence. But those were not the qualities most in demand in Langley because there was no doubt about his credentials as a brutal assassin. Given the pressures to get on with a plan to topple Castro, Cubela still seemed to be the ideal candidate, the first recruit in the sprawling network of Cuban agents who retained senior military rank and was an authentic revolutionary hero. If his promise was greater than what he had delivered so far, it would be up to Sanchez to mold and motivate him.³

The last of their meetings in Brazil was on Sunday, September 8. Unknown to anyone at CIA, by then Fidel knew nearly everything that had taken place between the men. DGI agents were informing headquarters that Cubela was in and out of CIA’s grip, meeting in a safe house, talking about which military officers might be tempted away. Fidel knew the Americans were stalking him again. Just as he had learned of the earlier plots, counterintelligence was advising him of the latest threat. He revealed this himself in April 1978 when he met in Havana with a delegation from the House assassinations committee.

“For three years we had known there were plots against us.”⁴

He did not specify exactly what he meant. But it made no difference to him if the Americans were plotting his assassination or a coup. It was a distinction without a difference. His fate would be the same in either event. Anyone with the least understanding of Cuba’s experience understood that Fidel Castro was synonymous with the revolution. Umbilically connected, they live or perish as one. It had been that way since the first shots were fired against the Batista dictatorship in July 1953. Since he won power no Cuban had ever challenged Fidel’s hegemony and gotten away with it.

If he survived the initial treachery of a Yankee-sponsored coup attempt, even one that resulted in numerous casualties, he would never surrender. He would rally as many followers as possible, retreat to the same mountains in Oriente where he had waged his guerrilla war, and counterattack until either he triumphed again or was killed in the effort. Martyrdom was far preferable to the shame of exile or captivity.

Fidel had no intention, though, of meeting any of those fates. Since his troubled childhood, Castro had always battled his enemies, conspired against them, manipulated and undermined them in every way possible. He would seize the initiative, take advantage of any opportunity, artfully dodge and dissemble. He calculated every move with an accomplished gambler’s take on the odds and a sharpie’s eye on risks and benefits. He gave no quarter and kept his foreign enemies in the dark. During nearly five decades in power, Fidel rarely ever threatened any of them in concrete and specific terms. Warnings and threats would only alert them, yield them advantages, and reduce his chances of being able to spring surprises.

But the news he was receiving from Porto Alegre alarmed and enraged him. He understood now more conclusively than ever that the Kennedys would never reconcile with him. Washington always ignored the feelers he put out suggesting he was amenable to bilateral talks that might reduce tensions. He shared his brooding true feelings about what he confronted in Havana with a visiting former American congressman in early October, soon after Sanchez’s meetings with Cubela in Porto Alegre. “We don’t trust President Kennedy . . . we know of the plans the CIA is carrying out.”⁵

In public he had said something similar only once before. In a speech in April 1963 on the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, he shouted to a crowd of tens of thousands in Havana’s Revolutionary Plaza: “Recently, they have been emphasizing the need to murder the leaders of the revolution.” This was just as CIA started gearing up its arsenal of covert programs and after Cubela’s meetings with Weatherby in Europe. Cuban doubles, illegals, and penetration agents were keeping Fidel well informed. He may also have been hearing from a supermole somewhere in the upper reaches of the Kennedy administration. Duly warned and fearing for his life more than at any time since the eve of the Bay of Pigs, he decided to do something unprecedented.

On Saturday evening, September 7, he showed up at an independence day reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana. It was not the kind of event he usually bothered with, and relations with Brazil were not particularly close, but there were things he meant to put on the public record. Beckoning Daniel Harker, a favorite wire service reporter, Fidel leaned forward and spoke rapidly in a long, impassioned monologue. An unidentified reporter with the UPI news service also participated, describing Fidel as “puffing on a cigar and leaning back in an easy chair.”⁶

Colombian-born, fluent in Spanish, and reporting for the Associated Press, Harker’s story got the widest circulation. It reached New York the next day and was published in different versions in major American dailies on Monday morning, September 9. Many of the headlines began the same way—“Castro Warns U.S.”⁷

The front page of the Miami Herald read: “We’ll Fight Back, Fidel Warns U.S.” The Los Angeles Times said: “Castro Warns U.S. on Meddling with Cuba.” The Chicago Tribune: “Castro Warns U.S. Not to Aid His Foes.” In New Orleans, where Lee Harvey Oswald was a regular newspaper reader, the Times Picayune carried the story on page 7. Its headline was: “Castro Blasts Raids on Cuba; Says US Leaders Imperiled by Aid to Rebels.”

Most of the papers quoted Fidel’s saber-rattling threats: “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. US leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe . . . United States leaders would be in danger if they helped in any attempt to do away with leaders of Cuba.”

Fidel’s words were inflammatory, unprecedented. The Cuban leader was signaling that he knew what Sanchez and Cubela were discussing. They may in fact have been meeting in Brazil just when Castro was at the Brazilian embassy in Cuba. That he chose to level his blast there could not have been coincidental.

Fidel probably thought that once alerted this way, Kennedy and CIA might be deterred from proceeding with their plot against him. He calculated too that it could be worth showing his hand on the chance he might gain some relief from the intensifying covert onslaught. His enemies might even fear that he had the motive and capability to spawn retaliatory plots against American leaders.

Harker quoted Castro saying: “The CIA and other dreamers believe in their hopes of an insurrection . . . [but] they can go on dreaming forever.” He was more than usually acrimonious when describing Kennedy. The president was “double-crossing,” following “shifting policies” toward Cuba. He is a “cretin . . . the Batista of his times.” Kennedy and Republican senator Barry Goldwater, a main aspirant for his party’s presidential nomination the following year, were ridiculed as “cheap, crooked politicians.”

Ray Rocca was correct when he later concluded that the interview “represented a more-than-ordinary attempt” by Castro “to get a message on the record in the United States.” Fidel had condemned and ridiculed Kennedy many times before, although never with as much venom and pugnacity. It was the first—and as far as I know, the only—time he ever explicitly threatened American leaders. Because he reiterated the threats, in different ways, they could not have been slips of the tongue.⁸

Remarkably, however, his harsh words had little or no resonance in American policy circles. The Washington Post, the most widely circulated daily in the capital, did not carry the story. The New York Times, read by most Washington government officials, carried an abbreviated UPI account on page 9. But the threats were not mentioned. The smaller-circulation Washington Evening Star carried much of Harker’s account but buried Fidel’s threat in the last third of its treatment on a back page. Fidel’s intended audiences had no ready access to his shots across their bow.

Only four men in CIA—Helms, FitzGerald, Halpern, and Sanchez—were fully in the know about the Cubela conspiracy. Only they would have been able to connect the dots. Sanchez said he was not aware of the Harker article until long after. Apparently it did not come to Helms’s attention either. Sam Halpern, in contrast, said he knew what Fidel said at the time: “We heard his threats against the president.” So it can be assumed that Des FitzGerald was informed as well. Even so, Halpern said it never occurred to anyone in the Agency that there could have been a connection between Fidel’s outburst on September 7 and Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas eleven weeks later. No one in CIA ever investigated that possibility. Still, as Halpern also observed, “[I]t may have been we just never gave Castro that much credit.”⁹

Beyond SAS, almost no one could have appreciated the enormity of what Fidel said. Most newspaper readers would have viewed Harker’s interview simply as more overheated hyperbole, the normal Castro fare. As they did not know of the assassination plots, CIA desk analysts had no reason to consider the story significant. Nor did propaganda specialists who followed Cuban rhetoric in another Agency component. There was no mention of Harker in the otherwise comprehensive CIA inspector general’s report. The Secret Service apparently was not told of the threats against the president. I do not believe that the Warren Commission was informed of them when it began its investigation a few months after the assassination.¹⁰

The only time Fidel was asked on the record about the interview was in 1978, during his meeting with a delegation from the House assassinations committee. The Harker interview was one of the first issues raised. Fidel was masterful in self-defense:

“I remember my intention . . . was to warn the government that we knew about the plots against our lives . . . that they could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions, but I did not mean to threaten.”¹¹

Whether a warning, a threat, or a plea—and, in reality, it was all three—Fidel wanted relief from the ever more encroaching American aggression. He did not worry much about an organized coup as such. He and Raul had hand-picked their troop commanders and senior defense ministry staffers. All were hardcore loyalists. Fidel knew Cubela well and was confident he could not organize and lead a military revolt. His standing as a comandante was really honorific. He was peripheral in the leadership, too odd and indecisive.

Assassination, however, was something else. A coup would have a chance at success only if the Castro brothers were killed in an initial lightning strike. Fidel worried about such a scenario all the time. Even in 1963, as perhaps the world’s best-protected head of state, he could not be sure he would be warned in time of the next assassin. He knew that some of the CIA plots against him had been ingenious, even if they had all been foiled. What he feared most was the unexpected ploy, some bolt from the blue they might try next. How many others were out there intent on murdering him? Quite a few, as it later became clear.

Among them was Mario Salabarria, an exile asset known in the Agency as AMTURVY–13. A formidable enemy of Fidel’s since the university gang wars of the late 1940s, he had served a stint as secret police chief before fleeing to Miami. By the summer of 1963 he was seeking weapons and support from JMWAVE to assassinate his old nemesis. A declassified Agency dossier explains that in October he was given “a few pistols, revolvers, and sabotage materials.” Another document adds, however, that “Salabarria’s case presents certain CI [counterintelligence] considerations.” CIA analysts later judged that it appeared likely the DGI had been tracking the AMTURVY plot, and others, from the start. It seemed as if half of the Miami exile community was plotting how to eliminate Castro.¹²

By the fall of 1963, Fidel was certain he was facing a proliferating and truly existential threat. A Soviet defector referred to it in his memoirs. The high-level Kremlin officials he worked with all believed Castro was “terrified” of Kennedy. That may have been an exaggeration, though not by much. In April 2009, a year after he retired from the Cuban presidency, Fidel published an editorial stating that, of the ten American presidents he had confronted, he had feared Kennedy the most. The remark accurately reflected the forebodings he felt in 1963.¹³

Kennedy was indeed a formidable enemy. Jack Bell, a journalist friend of the president’s, remarked in an oral history interview that Kennedy “had the feeling he could cope with anybody on earth.” That was precisely what preoccupied Fidel. He understood that because of Kennedy’s humiliation at the Bay of Pigs and the brinksmanship of the missile crisis, he would remain the president’s implacable foe. And he was convinced that the Kennedys were capable of almost anything as they endeavored to topple him from power.¹⁴

DES FITZGERALD WAS IN A HURRY, as usual. The Pentagon is about a fifteen-mile drive from Langley, downriver along the Potomac on the scenic George Washington Parkway. His driver, hugging the left lane all the way, knew to stay well above the speed limit. Des liked to drive that way when going to work after weekends at his country place. Halpern remembered that his foot was always pressed “through the floorboards” as he raced in his Volkswagen Beetle. “When he got on those highways, he was murder.” (Des also drove a Jaguar, but it was often in the shop.)¹⁵

The meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff began at two P.M. on September 25. Two months earlier FitzGerald had also consulted with the nation’s top four-star generals and admirals for the same purpose: to review the Cuba covert action program, particularly the plan for a military uprising. In that first meeting he had wanted the officers to be aware that once the coup was ignited, American military intervention might be required to reinforce it. The Pentagon needed to begin working with SAS on contingency plans. Des returned to brief the chiefs again as the prospects for overthrowing Castro seemed to be brightening.¹⁶

FitzGerald was a showman, utterly convincing in the role of debonair superspy, his booming, patrician-inflected voice reverberating in the paneled conference room. Rarely, perhaps never before, had the Pentagon’s top brass convened to meet with a CIA executive. It was not within their normal span of responsibilities. But Des sat down with them twice, as the president’s representative in charge of the Cuba war that they knew to be a White House priority.

Des said that he had a stronger mandate than ever before to proceed with the gamut of covert operations. The prospects for success were steadily improving. He told them—with more hope than conviction—that Fidel’s hold on power had been slipping since their last meeting. The JMWAVE sabotage attacks, and others mounted independently by dissidents on the island, were beginning to take a real toll. He mentioned raids by light aircraft on Cuban targets, something that Ted Shackley denied ever happened. Unrest was growing, Des was sure. Fidel would fall in the not-distant future.¹⁷

None of that was remotely what the analysts were writing, nor did it resemble the talking points FitzGerald shared with the National Security Council six days later at the White House. With the attorney general present that day, Des was more cautious, reluctant to raise expectations for Castro’s imminent demise too high. He had been bullish, maybe a bit bombastic with the Joint Chiefs. He may have wanted to lord it over that roomful of the nation’s most senior officers. Author Evan Thomas wrote that even at White House policy meetings, FitzGerald was often “outgoing, cocky, and confident.” He treated the president’s most senior national security advisors as his equals “and bluffed the rest.”¹⁸

Des was buoyant, on some matters prescient with the Chiefs. He warned that Castro would “probably take desperate measures” as his situation deteriorated. Specifically, he meant that violent subversion in Latin America would intensify. He also worried that Cuban air and naval forces had gained so much strength with Soviet assistance that CIA ships ferrying exile commandos and saboteurs from Florida were in increasing peril. The Kremlin had provided Cuba with six sub chasers and a dozen motor torpedo boats. Hundreds of naval personnel had been trained in the Soviet Union to man them. JMWAVE might need emergency military backup if the Cubans tried to commandeer the Rex, the Leda, or other large ships in Shackley’s navy.¹⁹

Des could have added that Fidel would also crack down more cruelly on domestic opposition if he feared that his position was weakening. No one in Washington knew about the bizarre October 1962 Armageddon letter, but there were plenty of other well-known examples of Castro’s truculence and brutality. If Des was in fact aware of the Harker interview, he was undeterred, proceeding at full throttle with the AMLASH plot and a number of others, though possibly with a more wary eye on the unpredictable and vengeful Fidel.

At the Pentagon, Des told his audience that he was having “great success getting closer to military personnel who might break with Castro.” There were at least ten high-level military commanders “talking with the CIA,” he claimed. Declassified CIA records suggest he was exaggerating at least by half. It is not clear if he included some of the dozen officers Cubela had told Sanchez about in Porto Alegre, but if so, Des was ignoring how useless that report had been. He admitted that the potential coup members were not yet talking to each other. Cubela, the magic missing link to make that happen, could not be unveiled. No one at the Defense Department knew he was talking to the Agency.

Yet something else Des revealed that afternoon could not have been misunderstood. He told them he had been studying “in detail” the 1944 Valkyrie assassination attempt against Hitler by dissident German military officers. He was looking for precedents, hoping, he said, “to develop an approach.” That plot failed when a bomb placed by a conspirator blew up close to the Führer, injuring him only slightly. Des wanted to learn from the mistakes made there so that a similar operation against Castro could succeed. The only record of this discussion that I have been able to find is in the minutes of the Pentagon meeting recorded by an officer there. Whatever else may have been collected in SAS about plans to mimic the Hitler plot has disappeared or remains locked away in CIA vaults.²⁰

However much Agency officers later tried to downplay the assassination part of the plot, Des had confirmed it was to be the trigger for a military coup. In their congressional testimonies, Helms and Sanchez insisted that with Cubela, they were only promoting a coup, not an assassination conspiracy. The first, they admitted, might easily result in the second, but regime change was the objective, not Castro’s death. Sanchez admitted when pressed that a coup would undoubtedly be messy: There would be gunfire and bloodshed, people would die. But murder, he insisted, was not the goal. In his memoirs Helms agreed.²¹

Halpern, who knew the AMLASH case as well as anyone, never tried to hide its true purpose. Cubela, he admitted on different occasions, was meant to assassinate Fidel. In an oral history interview in 1988, he said it was the only assassination operation “I was directly involved in.” During other confessional moments—in congressional testimonies and a signed affidavit—he stripped the story of any pretense. A senator asked him in 1975 if CIA had “carte blanche authority to remove Mr. Castro in any way, either overthrow him, or kill him?” Under oath, Sam responded: “Yes sir.” The authors of the 1967 inspector general’s assassination report, who interviewed Halpern, FitzGerald, Sanchez, and others, also concluded that assassination was the goal.²²

Des’s draft coup plan, elaborately detailed, was circulating in policy circles in October. Classified TOP SECRET-SENSITIVE, it would have been seen by fewer than two dozen officials. The objective was to guarantee that an acceptable anti-communist government would emerge after Fidel, even if a massive American military intervention was required. That possibility was described as “rescue of a revolt.” Cubela and his presumed co-conspirators were expected to proclaim a provisional government as soon as Fidel and “the top echelon of the Cuban leadership” were dead or deposed. The euphemism employed was “neutralize.” Nothing in the plan allowed for Fidel’s capture alive. Once the rebels gained momentum and controlled some territory, American diplomatic recognition and support would follow.²³

The CIA estimates office was tasked with scoping out how the Kremlin might react. Naturally, there was concern that another superpower showdown could erupt in Cuba, especially if American troops got involved. Des was encouraged by the analysts’ response. They concluded that “there is almost nothing the Soviets could do in Cuba itself to influence the course of events.” Relations with the United States would suffer a shuddering blow, because Marxist Cuba was such an important Soviet lodgment on the American doorstep, but there would be no truly dire consequences.

Even if the coup attempt faltered in the face of fierce resistance from Castro loyalists, most likely the several thousand Soviet military on the island would stay out of the fray. Sherman Kent, the intelligence estimating grand master, added that “Soviet inaction would be somewhat less embarrassing if Fidel were liquidated at the outset.” Kent may have suspected or overheard whispered snippets in the executive dining room that such a plan was afoot.²⁴

FOR DES, OCTOBER 1963 was to be the month of no return. The pace of coup promotion activities accelerated under a global effort code-named MHAPRON. Its purpose was to coordinate interlacing operations of many types, all concentrated on rupturing the Cuban military. SAS at Langley, JMWAVE, and the large Cuba branch at the Mexico City station were the legs of the ambitious, lavishly funded operational tripod.²⁵

The newly inaugurated Voice of the Rebel Army covert radio station was broadcasting six nights a week from Swan Island. The programming, according to a CIA document, was “designed to inspire army units to unite and rise up in a coup.” Military listeners were assured that if they rebelled, they would receive American support regardless of how closely they had been allied with the regime. It was time, they were urged, to restore the revolution to the democratic values the rebel army veterans had fought for before Castro betrayed them by turning to communism.²⁶

Operation AMTRUNK geared up that fall. Ramón Guin, an army captain and former colleague of Cubela’s in the struggles against Batista, was recruited on the island by an Agency penetration agent. He was designated AMTRUNK–10. The hope was that he would identify and recruit other disaffected military men to join with him and then link up with Cubela in a coordinated revolt. Although Guin’s revolutionary and military credentials were flimsy—he never held a troop command or important government post, and had few contacts in the Castros’ circles—he became the unlikely figurehead of this second cabal.

Cubela liked Guin and said he was willing to conspire with him. But he told Sanchez of concerns about his old friend’s “nervous condition” and drinking problem. Thirty-year-old Guin was an even weaker reed in intrigue and coup instigation than Cubela. By November 9 there had been no progress. JMWAVE had provided Guin with an OWVL radio. He was asked if other prospective conspirators had yet been enlisted. They had not.²⁷

From the start, neither Miami nor Langley had been enthusiastic about the AMTRUNK scheme. It had “a very high flap potential,” Shackley warned headquarters. He was overruled; the plan had enthusiastic White House backing. The president was persuaded by a prominent journalist friend with contacts among Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits that he could help split Castro’s military. A critical 1977 Agency review of the operation stated that “pressure was exerted on CIA by Higher Authority.” Another postmortem speculated that the journalist may have been double-dealing, reporting everything back to Castro.²⁸

Shackley was alarmed that AMTRUNK was in fact a dangle-and-deception ploy run by Cuban intelligence. FitzGerald and Helms soon agreed, though they had no choice but to continue down the presidentially prescribed dead-end path. Ultimately, Shackley was vindicated: in 1977 an Agency report concluded that “the activity appears to have been insecure and doomed to failure from its inception.” It was yet another of the many ingenious DGI double-agent operations run against the Agency, no doubt also masterminded by Fidel himself.²⁹

In Miami, Shackley was doing his share to keep the coup cauldron simmering. He befriended Al Burt, the Latin America editor of the Miami Herald, providing him access to an important new Cuban defector. Rolando Santana was a captain in Cuban intelligence, a survivor of the 1956 landing when Fidel launched his guerrilla war, and a veteran of the insurgency that ensued. In mid-October 1963 Burt published a series of exclusive interviews. Santana, then sequestered in “a Miami hideaway,” was quoted as saying what sounded like the text of a script written by Des FitzGerald: “There are men inside Cuba just waiting for a chance” to move against the regime. “They are in the rebel army and the government. When they find something solid to rally around, they will fight.”³⁰

Meanwhile, the JMWAVE navy was operating more aggressively in Cuban and surrounding waters. Sabotage and commando raids and infiltrations were stepped up. On-island casualties, civilian and militia, were rising. The Cuban economy was in shambles. Through October Castro grew progressively more incensed, fearing some unknown assassin might get close enough to him to succeed.

That was exactly what Nestor Sanchez hoped to achieve when he sat down with Cubela again, this time in Paris, on October 5. They met in the fashionable home of John Neville “Red” Stent, a senior Paris-based CIA officer. Stent lived in the affluent Saint-Cloud suburb, not far from Versailles. Cubela had been there before and may have been invited up into the attic to appreciate Stent’s impressive collection of miniature lead soldiers. Cubela was generally more relaxed than he had been in Porto Alegre and was in what Sanchez described hopefully as a “confessional” mood. But, vacillating as usual, the Cuban was also on edge and recalcitrant.³¹

“Uninterested in unimportant tasks,” as Sanchez put it in his cable to FitzGerald, Cubela still refused to use the secret writing skills he had been taught. Sanchez had planned to provide him with OWVL communications equipment instead, but concluded Cubela would refuse that as well. The critically important question of how this star agent would communicate securely with the Agency once back in Cuba organizing a coup was never resolved. It was probably a main reason why, in the contingency plans, FitzGerald included provisions for the “special teams” that would infiltrate Cuba and handle communications between coup leaders and the Agency.

Cubela had reached a crossroads. He had been prattling for over a year about wanting to fulfill a historic mission by killing Castro. Now he was pressed to commit to a specific plan. In response, he also upped the ante, insisting on assurances that he was being taken seriously in Washington, and by the topmost administration officials. Sanchez cabled Des that Cubela was “highly depressed,” believing his value and ability to alter the course of Cuban history were not sufficiently appreciated. Sanchez reassured him; “his case was receiving consideration at the highest levels.” He meant Bobby Kennedy, and by extension the president, and may actually have told Cubela exactly that.

When I met with Sanchez in the summer of 2008 to discuss Cubela, he told me that he had conferred privately in 1963 with the attorney general to discuss Cuban operations. Years after his retirement from CIA and a tour during the Reagan presidency as the Pentagon’s top civilian Latin America official, Sanchez was reluctant to discuss matters he considered still classified. He admitted, though, that he had met with Bobby Kennedy at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy mansion near CIA headquarters. Sanchez said he went there “on a few occasions.” He would not tell me how often or provide details of the discussions.³²

They are not difficult to reconstruct, however. Cubela was Sanchez’s principal, nearly exclusive, responsibility, and the attorney general was surely informed of progress in the operation during those visits. Their talks were not likely to have been confined to the Cubela case; FitzGerald probably instructed Sanchez to discuss progress in other areas of the far-flung Cuba program. Sanchez, the trusted intermediary in some of the most sensitive CIA operations ever undertaken, did volunteer during our meeting that “Des FitzGerald and Bobby really wanted to terminate the Castro regime.”

A wrap-up cable to Des after the October 5 meeting in Paris came as close as anything Sanchez ever put on the record admitting that he was engaged in an assassination conspiracy. He wrote that as he and Cubela were leaving Stent’s home, Cubela expressed again his wish to return to Cuba “to undertake the big job.” Despite all the red flags and doubts about Cubela’s reliability, he became the Kennedy administration’s shining hope to decapitate the Castro regime. Caution and common sense were thrown to the Caribbean winds.³³

Still in Paris, Sanchez met with Tepedino on October 10 and the morning of October 11. The jeweler conveyed Cubela’s latest thinking—and new demands— that had coalesced in the days following the meeting at Stent’s. The stunning new twist explained in Sanchez’s cable to headquarters on the eleventh was that Cubela demanded a meeting with a senior administration official—and not just any official. He “prefers GPFOCUS.” That was the tart Agency cryptonym for Robert Kennedy. The attorney general was so involved with SAS operations that there had to be a secure way to refer to him in communications.

Sanchez reported that Cubela wanted Bobby’s personal assurances of American support “for any activity he undertakes” against Castro. The evidence is compelling that it was another euphemism for assassination.³⁴

When researching his biography of Robert Kennedy, Evan Thomas found that the attorney general received a phone call from FitzGerald on October 11. Des and Bobby spoke frequently about Cuba operations, and it is difficult to imagine they did not discuss Cubela’s demand for a meeting in that conversation. Helms was asked during one of his Senate testimonies if Des briefed Bobby about Cubela’s demand. The guarded response was: “I would have thought he would have.” Sanchez testified that he “assumed” Kennedy had been informed.³⁵

It was an “untidy arrangement,” Helms told the Church Committee, referring to the attorney general’s involvement in the CIA’s Cuban activities. He added that the president wanted Bobby “involved in these matters.” A seasoned case officer was assigned to work exclusively for Bobby. Charlie Ford, using the alias Rocky Fiscalini, conducted dangerous meetings for the attorney general with international Mafia gangsters presumed to still have useful contacts in Cuba. Ford shared a cubicle office with Sanchez in SAS quarters, but neither ever discussed his work with the other.³⁶

Bobby Kennedy maintained off-line relationships with a number of militant Cuban exiles, visiting Miami to encourage them and to hector JMWAVE personnel. “It was a gross violation of security,” Helms wrote, “and played hob with operational discipline.” But there was no skirting Bobby’s interventions. His amateur freelancing in espionage took some strange turns. The penetration agent who had infiltrated Cuba and recruited Ramón Guin to join the AMTRUNK operation said Bobby had authorized him—unilaterally, it appears— to “offer large sums of money” to any Cuban air force pilot willing to defect with a MiG fighter jet.³⁷

When we met in Miami, I asked Cubela why he had demanded a meeting with the attorney general. He said it was because he knew Kennedy “could get me all the material I wanted and needed to overthrow Castro.” Bobby’s outsize role was no secret in Miami, Havana, or Langley, but Cubela’s demand was an unusually provocative one. To consult with the attorney general would be to sit down with the president’s alter ego, his most trusted confidant and advisor. It would be nearly the equivalent of a meeting with the chief executive himself. Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, said in an oral history interview that in foreign policy, Bobby “meticulously followed the president’s instructions . . . he never freewheeled.” Others who worked with the brothers said the same. Cubela was proposing to entangle both Kennedys in a conspiracy that, one way or the other, was intended to result in Fidel Castro’s death.³⁸

Sanchez lobbied hard for the meeting. From Paris, he cabled FitzGerald that the answer Cubela got “may be crucial point in our relationship.” Any reasons given to discourage such a meeting “will certainly not satisfy AMLASH . . . We must be prepared to face the request.” Sanchez was a calloused case officer, with a hard edge; he knew he was recommending something extremely unusual and dangerous. Agents, even the best and most trusted ones, are rarely indulged in the way Cubela was demanding.

And the Cuban remained an unknown quantity, as Helms himself admitted in his memoirs. Sanchez acknowledged the “implications, risks, and problems” associated with exposing the Kennedy brothers to what could easily be a Cuban double-agent operation. Still, he recommended that the “highest and profound consideration” be given to Cubela’s demand.³⁹

Implicitly, he was urging that it be approved that Des consult with Kennedy. Sanchez was convinced that they were at a watershed, that without a meeting between Cubela and the attorney general, the Cuban would bolt and abandon his relationship with the Agency. Sanchez thought, or desperately wanted to believe, that the potential benefits of a meeting outweighed the considerable risks. Like Helms and FitzGerald, he was feeling the weight of Bobby Kennedy’s pressures to move the plot along.⁴⁰

AS SANCHEZ CONSULTED with Cubela in Paris, millions of Cubans were suffering the consequences of the worst natural disaster in the island’s modern history. Powerful Hurricane Flora first struck on Friday morning, October 4, and then lingered erratically over the eastern provinces for another four and a half days. Hurricane-force winds and unprecedented rains continued uninterrupted. The CIA, in a national intelligence estimate devoted exclusively to the storm, described it as “the worst that ever hit Cuba.”⁴¹

Flora turned demonic loops, whirling stationary for fourteen hours over a single flattened and flooded region. Hurricane experts in Miami had never heard of anything like it. Fidel said that a “tidal wave came, not from the sea, but from the mountains.” More than eleven hundred perished in Oriente Province alone, tens of thousands were homeless, and vast croplands were inundated. The entire town of Mayarí, near Fidel’s birthplace, was swept away. It was said he nearly drowned trying to ford a surging river near there. Although the Cuban media trumpeted that he was pulled out by a local peasant, concerned about his finely honed image of invulnerability, Fidel never mentioned it.⁴²

He directed recovery efforts, bivouacking in the countryside, marshaling scarce resources, and, in his own imperious fashion, consoling the families of victims. The Kennedy administration offered emergency relief through the Red Cross, but relations had been so inflamed that Castro rejected it as a gesture of obscene hypocrisy.

“We are honored by not accepting it,” he thundered from a Havana television studio. He issued an angry communiqué: “The enemies of our homeland do not hide their joy . . . the pain of the humble gives joy to the people’s malicious enemies.”⁴³

He was outraged because there had been no pause in what he considered a CIA reign of terror, even as the millions affected by Flora were still grieving over their dead and struggling to find food and shelter. American malice, he thought, had never been more tauntingly inhumane.

“They are cynics, brazen, shameless liars . . . they took advantage because of the hurricane.”

He meant Kennedy and the CIA, and Cuban exile contract agents, and he was not exaggerating. In the tense weeks of the hurricane cleanup, there were coordinated incursions intended to raise tensions on the island and help set the stage for the coup.

The first bloody encounter occurred only a day after Flora had finally veered off to the north, away from the island. CIA commandos infiltrated by sea, killing two civilians when their sabotage mission went awry. In a national broadcast, Fidel claimed that “of the seven individuals who took part, five have already been captured.”⁴⁴

“These have been the activities of the counterrevolutionaries and the CIA after the hurricane,” Fidel shouted. Then, grimacing, he pounded the table in the television studio.

“They have been harboring illusions that this is the time. . . . Right away they thought of invading. . . . Go ahead and launch an invasion.”⁴⁵

It was another acknowledgment that he was alarmed, knowing he was looming large in American sights. His admirers have often said that throughout his long public career, Fidel was fearless, never blinking or wavering in the face of danger. It is a myth that falsely glorified him. In October and November 1963, he lived in dread of what the Americans were preparing to do.

As the AMLASH conspiracy was advancing, the CIA struck again late on the night of October 21, several hours after the moon had set. The sabotage mission off the far southwestern coast of the island was like so many other incursions, but it ended tragically. Cuban military forces awaited the intruders in ambush. Four exile frogmen were captured as they came ashore. Another six launched from the CIA mother ship onto a second speedboat were fired on by Cuban aircraft and patrol vessels but managed to escape, eventually reaching Panama.⁴⁶

Amid the chaos, Cuban fighter jets shot up a Liberian-flagged freighter carrying bauxite ore from Jamaica that happened to be passing close to the CIA mother ship, which was disguised as a hydrographic research vessel. The incident was a nagging international news event for days. The Kennedy administration denied any knowledge, but Helms had to explain to other senior Washington officials what had gone wrong. Cuban intelligence, he had to admit, penetrated what he called “the reception committee” of Agency assets on the island. One or more had been doubled. The Cubans “laid a trap,” he said, for the arriving commandos. The declassified record of that meeting identified the operation as Number 3105, high in the sequence of Kennedy-era commando raids.⁴⁷

The damage done to Agency operations was substantial. Covers were blown, skilled agents were lost, equipment was captured, and sensitive CIA covert methods were laid bare. The two most dependable ships—the Rex and the Leda—were so compromised by all the press coverage that they had to be taken out of service. And worst of all, the Agency’s ability to operate clandestinely on the island was severely compromised. Fidel was encouraged with the progress his special forces had made against the enemy.⁴⁸

He was dealing simultaneously with the hurricane aftermath and the CIA. During those arduous weeks in October, he seemed to be everywhere. While orchestrating every step of the government’s response to the storm, he personally commanded the intelligence and security forces that surprised the captured CIA infiltrators and the naval and air elements that attempted to seize or sink the CIA mother ship. He was an inexhaustible presence on Cuban radio and television. Frenetic action and discourse were always his best therapy when under stress. Characteristically, he was also retaliating in kind, lashing out in many directions. It was then that Cuba’s first “Africa Corps” was dispatched to Algeria. Raúl spoke to the departing volunteers on October 9, telling them that “a sister country was under attack from reactionary imperialist forces.”⁴⁹

Fidel authorized Piñeiro to accelerate armed subversive actions against a number of countries. Operation Flora, a landing on the coast of the Dominican Republic just days after Hurricane Flora, inserted guerrillas fresh from Cuban commando training camps. An embryonic insurgency initiated operations in the rugged northwestern mountains of Argentina with Cuban participants. If it grew, Che Guevara planned to travel to his native country to join it; the Bolivia plan developed much later. The future defector Vladimir Rodríguez Lahera— AMMUG—had several meetings with Piñeiro at DGI headquarters to coordinate a shipment of explosives to Salvadoran communists. One of Che’s tomes advocating guerrilla insurrection was recirculating prominently in the official media. “We should not fear violence,” he argued; it is “the midwife of new societies.”⁵⁰

The most promising target was still Venezuela. A CIA analysis said it was the only country where Cuba was expecting “imminent revolutionary victory.” The guerrilla front there received virtual diplomatic recognition when it opened an official liaison office in Havana. Cuban media devoted inordinate attention to the guerrillas, charging that Kennedy was planning to intervene with military force. Then, on November 1, a Cuban vessel seconded to the DGI delivered three tons of weapons and ammunition to a remote beach on the Venezuelan coast. Submachine guns, mortars, recoilless rifles, and demolition supplies were buried in a trench in the sand. A local fisherman discovered the cache in Falcón State on November 1, before the guerrillas could get to it. Now the Betancourt government, which Fidel had endeavored so aggressively to overthrow, had the upper hand.⁵¹

CIA took credit as well. In Senate testimony Helms suggested that the fisherman who discovered the arms cache was a handy foil. The success against the DGI was really the result of painstaking intelligence work, a joint effort by the Agency and Venezuelan security working with a penetration agent in the guerrilla movement. Two Cuban defectors told me that the same CIA agent—Francisco Carballo Pacheco, El Espia Pacheco—who worked in Cuban army mapmaking and later compromised the May 1967 guerrilla landing at Machurucuto had betrayed this incursion as well.

The next step was to prove that the arms originated in Cuba. Writing for the Daily Summary, CIA analysts told how Cuban intelligence had endeavored to grind off all serial numbers and identifying inscriptions from the weapons. Using special acids, Agency technicians were able, nonetheless, to “raise the numbers and shields” of three of them. The identifiers corresponded to weapons known to have been delivered to Cuba from Belgium in 1959 and 1960. The analysts concluded there was “definite proof” the weapons “came from Cuba.”⁵²

In his memoirs, Helms tells of taking one of the captured submachine guns to show Robert Kennedy. “Half an hour later we were in the White House, answering the President’s questions.” When they were done, Helms slipped the weapon into the canvas travel bag in which he had brought it in. He recalled that “as the president turned to shake hands, I said, ‘I am sure glad the Secret Service didn’t catch us bringing this gun in here.’ The President’s expression brightened. He grinned, shook his head and said, ‘Yes, it gives me a feeling of confidence.’” Three days later Kennedy traveled in the fatal motorcade in the streets of Dallas.⁵³

IT TOOK MANY YEARS, but the truth about Rolando Cubela’s true loyalties gradually emerged. Evidence of his duplicity had been accumulating since the mid-1960s, and now, with what I have learned from a knowledgeable Cuban defector and a long-ignored CIA document, it can be stated unequivocally that he conspired with Fidel.

The first hint came from Castro himself. On May 2, 1966, he met with New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews, whose archived notes of their conversation were not released for public use until a number of years later. Matthews quoted Fidel this way: “Cubela was a weak, neurotic type that they nursed along, but he was not getting the jobs he thought he deserved and he was in bad company.”⁵⁴

Matthews spoke to interior Minister Ramiro Valdés the next day. Cubela, the latter said, “had been reduced to supervisor of medical education in a big Havana hospital, and his friends realized his discontent and neurotic nature, so he was, in a sense being watched.”⁵⁵

Valdés spoke definitively about Cubela nineteen years later, on June 5, 1985, in a meeting with another visiting journalist. “Yes, we had information about his trip abroad, that he had contacts with the CIA, that he had a mission to assassinate Fidel. We knew this.” The admission, stored at the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection, seems to have gone unnoticed by earlier researchers.⁵⁶

But how did Valdes know of the assassination plan, and when was it compromised? Was there an informant close to Cubela? Could the crafty jeweler Tepedino have been a double agent? Had Cubela himself been reporting to Cuban intelligence, perhaps from the first meeting with a CIA officer in Mexico City? Weatherby was asked to comment on that possibility by the Church committee. He said: “It is always possible they suspected him, or knew of it . . . but this does not make him a double agent.” Perhaps then, Cubela just talked too much, spent too freely, vacationed too lavishly, made himself conspicuous, and came under DGI surveillance.

In May 1997, Ricardo Alarcón, the long-serving president of the rubber-stamp Cuban legislative body, the National Assembly, was the first authoritative source to suggest the answer. Alarcón was close to Cubela in 1960 when they served together in the top two positions in the University of Havana student federation. Author Richard Mahoney asked him about Cubela during a Havana interview. He said, “Cubela may have been a Castro plant.”⁵⁷

It was in the spring of 2011 when I was finally convinced that Alarcon had been right. It was then that I met Miguel Mir, another DGI defector living in the United States. He had joined the DGI in 1973 at the age of sixteen, later serving at different times on the personal security squads of Fidel, Raúl, and Valdés. He had worked his way up into those absolutely trusted positions, putting him in daily proximity to the top leadership. From 1986 until 1992, Mir was a principal bodyguard and security officer for Fidel.

It was during the first year of that assignment, as a DGI lieutenant, that Mir also served as chief curator for sensitive military and security archives. His title was Military Historian for Fidel Castro’s Personal Security. Mir told me that in that position, he was custodian of the regime’s records of historical memorabilia related exclusively to the commander in chief. They were kept in a secret vault at a military facility near Havana.

He told me, “I read documents there about Rolando Cubela, stating that he was a double agent.” They dated from the 1961 to 1963 period. There were thousands of photos and records about Fidel. The archive, created by Castro’s aide and one-time paramour Celia Sánchez, memorialized him. “It was a record of all the attempts against his life,” Mir told me. “That’s why these were kept and not destroyed.”

I have no reason to doubt what Mir shared with me about this and other sensitive intelligence matters. What he saw in the archives indicates that Cubela was dangled in March 1961 in Mexico City and that he went on to report everything that took place in his meetings with CIA officers to Fidel and the DGI.

Even more recently I discovered yet more convincing evidence of Cubela’s double game. Carlos Tepedino admitted during an aggressive CIA polygraph examination in August 1965 that Cubela “had strong connections with Cuban intelligence and was probably cooperating with them in various ways.” He “had daily contacts with them . . . worked with them closely . . . knew what was going on in intelligence circles.” Even worse, Tepedino said that Cubela had told “everyone” about his CIA relationships; “everyone knew.” And, as Hal Swenson suspected, Tepedino admitted that Cubela had never tried to organize “a conspiracy to overthrow Castro and had no plan or followers who would work with him to achieve that.” Tepedino said that “a group as such was nonexistent.” AMLASH had been toying with his CIA handlers all along.⁵⁸

Results of the interrogation were shared with the Church committee and some of its contents vaguely summarized in the committee’s final report in April 1976. But Tepedino’s startling admissions attracted no further attention. Until now they have not been cited as a smoking gun proving Cubela’s duplicity and collaboration with Cuban intelligence, and thus with Fidel himself. The nine-page polygraph report was not declassified until 1998, and it was then filed away at the National Archives amid approximately a half million pages of CIA records relating to the Kennedy assassination. It was effectively lost until coming to my attention in October 2011.⁵⁹

But why did the CIA officers familiar with the case insist until their deaths that Cubela had been a reliable secret agent even after the results of Tepedino’s polygraph exam were written up in September 1965? A copy of that report is known to have been shared with headquarters Cuba operations officers. Yet Helms, Halpern, and Sanchez ignored it—or were never informed. They were not queried about it during testimonies before the Church committee, nor were Swenson, Shackley, Weatherby, and other CIA officers. The polygraph results were not mentioned in the 1967 inspector general’s report on assassination plots.

An intentional cover-up? Quite possibly the information was too incriminating, too embarrassing for those involved. If it were known conclusively outside of CIA that Cubela had worked with the DGI all along, haunting concerns about possible Cuban government involvement in Kennedy’s death inevitably would have been raised. In any event, it appears that Tepedino’s reluctant confessions were filed away in 1965 with the hope that they would never have to be explained.