TEN

GREAT MINDS

DES FITZGERALD LONGED TO PLAY A DASHING ROLE IN THE CLOAK-and-dagger world he loved, but he was too senior an executive to go into the streets doing case officer work. It was Cubela who provided him just such an opportunity and the chance to perform as leading man in one of the most illadvised capers in CIA history. Des decided to go to Paris and present himself to Cubela as Bobby Kennedy’s personal emissary.

He wanted to take the Cuban’s measure, confirm what he had been hearing from Sanchez. Smoldering curiosity compelled him, and in no small measure so did vanity and hubris. Bill Hood, coauthor of Helms’s autobiography and a veteran of CIA and the OSS, told me that Des “was impetuous and so self-confident that he had to assess Cubela personally. He typically thought he knew best, and was willing to take risks to do so.”

Ted Shackley, whom Des consulted, urged FitzGerald not to go; it was too hazardous for someone of his stature and visibility. Hal Swenson also was worried. He knew how good Cuban intelligence had become. “Probably I was better informed than anyone.” Hal said, “my disapproval of it was very strong. Des FitzGerald knew it, and preferred not to discuss it with me.” Des shut out the counterintelligence expert most qualified to warn him of the dangers.¹

Potentially the most important vote—Bobby Kennedy’s—may have tilted the balance. The precarious coup plan hinged on Cubela; he was indispensable and had to be encouraged. So, with an eye more on the political imperatives than the operational risks, Helms approved it. “I agreed that Des go to Paris and meet the Cuban under whatever high-level guise he might contrive.”²

FitzGerald had a backup plan in the event Cubela refused to confer with anyone other than the attorney general. The CIA was prepared to fly Cubela from an American air base in France directly to one in the United States. No passport or paperwork would be required. “First class treatment and accommodations” would be provided, according to a declassified SAS document. Presumably then Cubela would have been taken somewhere impressive to rendezvous secretly with Bobby Kennedy. It seems improbable that such a contingency plan could have been put on paper without the attorney general’s consent.³

Strangely enough, there was a precedent, of sorts. Oleg Penkovsky, one of the most valuable penetration agents in the history of western intelligence, provided information about Soviet missile programs and Kremlin political intrigue. He was a colonel in military intelligence but, unlike Cubela, was a fully vetted and trusted spy. He too pressed for a meeting with a top American official, hoping to be feted for his bravery and to have an opportunity to lobby for tougher American policies against the Soviets. Bobby Kennedy did agree to a clandestine meeting. Sadly, however, Penkovsky was arrested in Moscow in October 1962 and executed before one could be arranged.

For his own meeting, FitzGerald planned a show that could have come straight out of a vintage Hollywood movie. He wanted the rendezvous to be held at some splendid location where Cubela and Sanchez would be awaiting his grand entrance. The Paris station was instructed to be sure Cubela observed his arrival so he would be aware of FitzGerald’s importance as an august American dignitary. Des wanted to be slowly driven up to the meeting place in a Cadillac limousine, chauffeured by a liveried Agency officer. He ordered that a countersur-veillance team be deployed in the neighborhood. And in case he had not considered enough embellishments to sufficiently impress Cubela, he instructed Paris “to make it as impressive as possible.”⁴

The station must have offered some useful suggestions, because Sanchez cabled it on October 21 that “great minds think alike . . . present plan is for Dainold (FitzGerald’s pseudonym) to meet with AMLASH 29 October” between five and eight in the evening. Des traveled without disguise, using the alias James Clark, and, as Helms remembered, “did not trouble to affect any more high-level credentials than his appearance and manifest self-confidence suggested.”⁵

He arrived in Paris that morning. The meeting with Cubela came off as planned, though with improvisations. David Laux, the CIA case officer who chauffeured, was not in uniform and not behind the wheel of a limousine. He drove Des in what he described to me as his “beat-up old Peugeot.” Laux said, “I don’t recall that we took any special evasive actions or worried about surveillance.” Running a little late, they were in a hurry. Des congratulated Laux for maneuvering through the chaotic evening rush-hour traffic as aggressively as he himself would have. “If you ever decide to give up Agency work, you can always get another job as a Paris taxi driver.” Laux told me FitzGerald, “as always, was relaxed and bursting with self-confidence.”⁶

The meeting was at Red Stent’s home. Cubela told me he had no recollection of observing Des’s arrival but remembered he was genuinely impressed and satisfied that he had indeed met with a ranking American official close to the attorney general. Many years later he still believed FitzGerald was a blood relative of the Kennedys. Des conveyed Bobby’s commitment to the operation convincingly, with élan and in high style. Cubela told me he could not recall if he saw a personal message from Kennedy. Considering the attorney general’s reckless interest in the case, Des may well have showed the Cuban a signed letter of encouragement.⁷

The unlikely pair—Fidel’s premier double agent and Bobby Kennedy’s understudy—sat side by side. Sanchez translated and, back at headquarters two weeks later, prepared a memorandum for the record. It is the only surviving contemporaneous account of what is purported to have occurred. Des told Cubela that the Kennedy administration would support a coup to remove the Castro dictatorship. Ironclad assurances were given: “The United States is prepared to render all necessary assistance to any anti-communist group” that succeeds in “neutralizing the present Cuban leadership.” The implication was that a coup would be bloody and Fidel would be killed. In Senate testimony a dozen years later, Sanchez reluctantly conceded that Cubela talked that day about “getting at the leadership first.”⁸

The only record from FitzGerald himself comes from interviews in 1967 with the CIA inspector general. Des revealed that Cubela “spoke repeatedly of the need for an assassination weapon.” He wanted a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight or another weapon to kill Castro from a distance. Sanchez added that he also asked for grenades and a smaller, handheld weapon, such as a pellet or poison dart gun. Des insisted, however, that he told Cubela he wanted no part of a murder plan.⁹

Manny Gunn, the obedient doctor instructed to fabricate the assassination weapon, remembered it differently, saying that FitzGerald knew what it was for—”but didn’t want to know.” In a sworn affidavit, Sam Halpern agreed; the weapon was fabricated “in response to urgings by AMLASH for a means to start the coup by killing Castro.”¹⁰

FitzGerald never had to speak about the operation on the record. Nor did he have a chance to reconcile the contradictions between what he told the inspector general and all that the declassified record has subsequently revealed. The inspector general’s report was completed late in May 1967. Des’s death two months later during a vigorous game of tennis in blistering heat at his Virginia estate spared him the indignity of having to be grilled under oath about Cubela and whatever understandings he had with the Kennedys. Little of substance from FitzGerald’s SAS personal files is known to have survived, and the notes of his and all the other interviews with the inspector general were destroyed on Helms’s orders. It was thought at the time that everything about the AMLASH adventure would be buried deep in CIA archives, stored in brown envelopes sealed with black tape to ward off nosy file clerks, never again to see the light of day.¹¹

Until his death, Des remained confident that if John Kennedy had not been murdered, together they would have taken Castro down. In March 1964, then in a new position as western hemisphere division chief, FitzGerald traveled to Buenos Aires on a grand tour of the many CIA outposts in his expanded realm. Joseph Burkholder Smith, a young case officer in the Argentine capital, wrote about the visit years later. During a pep talk and briefing session in the station, Des talked about Cuba and JMWAVE.

“If Jack Kennedy had lived,” he told them, “I can assure you we would have gotten rid of Castro by last Christmas.” Smith pressed him. “What do you mean by ‘gotten rid of?’ “Just say I mean he wouldn’t still be doing business in Havana” was the response. Author Evan Thomas tells a similar story. Des made a friendly wager with a White House official on November 13, two weeks after the Paris meeting with Cubela. He bet $50, against two-to-one odds, that Castro would be gone before the 1964 presidential election. He had that much confidence in his supposedly star penetration agent.¹²

Cubela had done his double job convincingly. In Havana, the case must have been handled with the same care as it was in Langley. Most likely it was Fidel who trapped and turned Cubela in the first place and then managed the operation, as he did so many other doubles cases. It would have been characteristic of him to have Cubela demand a meeting with Bobby Kennedy, probably expecting the request would be denied, as it should have been. When Des substituted at Red Stent’s home in Saint-Cloud, Fidel had ultimate proof of how expertly CIA and the attorney general could be manipulated. By then Castro was sure that he had full control of the two-sided operation.

A few other Cuban double agents had been run against CIA before Cubela, but in some ways he was the role model for the many subsequent ones. His vacillations and quirks were partly innate, genuinely reflective of his peculiarities, but they were also dramatic contrivances used to gain operational advantage. In this sense, he was the forebear of the double agent “Robert,” previously described, who presented himself as rebellious and eccentric when working with the Agency in the 1980s and of another double who acted out the role of naïf. When Aspillaga’s defection exposed them, both were heralded by the Cuban media for their ingenuity. Odd behavior would always be counterintuitive for a true spy or mole, but for the Cubans it has often been key to the genius of their tradecraft.

Aspillaga tells a joke to explain the sporting gamesmanship of their methods. There was an old, cantankerous, and rich Cuban who died. Before his death he met with his executor and described in the minutest detail how he wanted his funeral to be staged. One kind of flower but not another. The music and procession had to be exactly what he prescribed. He designated the attendants and pallbearers, and what they should wear. He provided the eulogy and obsequies. The old man left nothing to chance or to the whims of his heirs. But finally, his executor said to him in exasperation. “But why? Why should you care about all that? You’ll be dead.” The old man laughed and said simply, “Para joder.” It translates roughly as “Just to screw around with them.”

Cubela was run against the unsuspecting CIA for another two and a half years, luring others into acts of treason and betraying them. Meeting periodically with Sanchez, he continued to lobby unsuccessfully for American help in killing Cuban leaders, probably because Fidel wanted to know if Lyndon Johnson also wanted him dead. Still known as AMLASH, Cubela worked with Manuel Artime, leader of one of Bobby Kennedy’s “autonomous” exile organizations, pretending again to plot Fidel’s murder.

In June 1965, two months before the incriminating polygraph interrogation of Tepedino, CIA finally shut down the operation. Then it was Fidel’s turn to ratchet up his charade. Cubela and Ramón Guin—AMTRUNK–10—were arrested in Cuba in March 1966 and put on trial. They were condemned to death, but within days Fidel commuted the sentences to prison time. In Cubela’s case, it was characterized as an act of magnanimity for a hero of the revolution gone astray. He was never added to Fidel’s demonology of “big traitors.” Castro tried to explain his leniency in a convoluted speech at the University of Havana, but his words rang false.¹³

Fidel mentioned nothing about Sanchez and Porto Alegre, the meeting with FitzGerald in Saint-Cloud, or any of the Kennedy-era assassination plotting. For another nine years the regime said nothing about those conspiracies. Cubela spent more than a dozen years in Cuban prisons, but always as a trusty. It was reported that he acted as an informant and enjoyed free run of one prison. He served as an inmate doctor, with privileges. His family visited regularly, and he lived well.¹⁴

The incarceration of an outstanding double agent may seem inexplicable at first. It was necessary, however, to perpetuate the fiction. Releasing him after a conviction for treason would be untenable, seeming to confirm what is now known about his treachery. Castro may have worried that their secret would not be safe if Cubela were freed; he could be tripled by the CIA, as sometimes happens, or talk too loosely. Perhaps the jeweler Tepedino would lure his friend into real opposition. It turned out there was no need for concern, however. Now living abroad, the former AMLASH has never wavered in upholding all the lies of his double life.¹⁵

FIDEL KNEW THE DETAILS of the Saint-Cloud summit within hours. His carefully laid trap had snapped shut. Now he had a bird in the hand, definitive evidence from the highest level of the government in Washington that the Kennedys and CIA were plotting his death. He knew the initial volley of shots was to be aimed at him.

Restless and energized, he again moved to the offensive. He was righteously enraged and wanted the world and everyone important in the Cuban leadership to know the war with the Americans had reached a dangerous new stage. In a marathon tirade televised on October 30—a day after Des’s meeting with Cubela—he excoriated CIA. All of his top security and intelligence advisors, and a phalanx of prominent regime officials, were present in the studio in a show of force and solidarity. He revealed that he was aware of the full range of American perfidies. CIA, he said, carries out “subversion, espionage, coups, and similar villainies” against Cuba.¹⁶

Seated before TV cameras and a cluster of microphones, Castro alternated between feigned fury and smug satisfaction. He condemned saboteurs, spies, and commandos but all the while was surely thinking mainly of assassins. A tableful of evidence was arrayed in front of him, proving a fresh CIA plot to smuggle arms and explosives into Cuba for use by dissidents. Detonators, ammunition, and hand grenades had been concealed in gallon-size cans of fruit and vegetables and flown into Havana by two Canadians whom Castro claimed were CIA agents.¹⁷

Cuban media coverage of the show highlighted a colorful can of fruit, fruta bomba conserve. Literally that means “bomb fruit,” but it is also a standard Cuban euphemism for papaya, which in the argot of the streets has an obscene meaning. The “bomb fruit” was supposedly canned by a delectables firm called Siboney in Miami. But the cans were too heavy with explosives and attracted the attention of Havana airport security. SAS, where all this was concocted, had displayed a delicious sense of humor that even its DGI opposite numbers must have grudgingly admired.¹⁸

Three days later, on November 2, another media spectacular featured three of the CIA commandos captured in the failed October 21 landing. Fidel did not appear this time, turning the proceedings over to an army comandante and three young security officers who conducted a live inquisition of the captives. Faced with the choice of confessing all or standing before an execution squad, they were cooperative, volunteering excruciating details about how the CIA mother ships and infiltrators operated.¹⁹

One of the elite interrogators, Lieutenant Juan Antonio Rodríguez Menier, later rose through ranks to become DGI Center chief in Budapest, then ultimately had a change of heart. As already revealed, he fled in 1987—Cuba’s devastating year of the defectors—and won asylum in the United States, where he remains, living under an assumed identity.²⁰

The target audiences for these shows were domestic. Fidel wanted to mobilize and motivate Cuban defenses. The Ministry of Interior battened down security hatches and upgraded its vigilance against all imaginable threats to the leadership. JMWAVE was receiving reports from the island of a severe security crackdown, according to one source, the worst since just before the Bay of Pigs. Leaders were preoccupied by increasing acts of spontaneous sabotage by dissidents and the rising tempo of coastal raids. The armed forces began using newly acquired Soviet helicopters to defend against them. In a late 1963 assessment, CIA analysts wrote, the armed forces had achieved a “higher level of combat capability” than ever.²¹

Military preparations reached unprecedented levels. Less than two weeks after Fidel spoke, Raúl announced the revolution’s first military draft. Boys as young as sixteen and men as old as forty-five were subject to three years of compulsory service. In the CIA Cuba Daily Summary, analysts detailed an unconfirmed agent report that Fidel had made an emergency trip to the Soviet Union sometime in the middle of November to confer secretly with Khrushchev. At a minimum, the rumor reflected the increased tension and uncertainty on the island.²²

The military buildup was in response to the American threat. Inductees were needed to strengthen the armed forces and to man the Soviet military equipment that had been flooding in. Deliveries—nine full shiploads of military materiel in 1963—included as many as 700 tanks, 20,000 military vehicles, 700 antiaircraft guns, and more than 100 MiG jet fighters, 41 of them the most advanced model. A capable and modernized military was emerging and the numbers of troops would soon swell to become the second largest force, after Brazil, in Latin America. CIA analysts judged the military leadership to be loyal to the regime. Purges, they wrote, had eliminated “anti-Castro elements.” There was little chance of “widespread disaffection” because precautions had been taken “to assure political reliability of the officer corps, even at the expense of military proficiency.”²³

The analysts were right. Had they been consulted about the viability of a military coup led by Rolando Cubela, they would have expressed profound skepticism. But they knew nothing of the agent code-named AMLASH or of FitzGerald’s high hopes for him. They could have told Des that Cubela was not one of the three or four top officials in the regime, as was believed in SAS. They knew he held no troop command and was not esteemed by most of his colleagues. The analysts would have thought of him as an unlikely leader of a successor government.²⁴

And true enough, Cubela was not pretending to make any progress. More than two weeks after the meeting with FitzGerald in Paris, SAS was still trying to determine if Cubela had enlisted anyone else in a plot. No one had, but he was complaining again. The promised CIA support had not been provided. From New York, Tepedino reported that Cubela was irate because he had not received the equipment that “promised a final solution.” He was acting petulantly but also telling CIA exactly what it wanted to hear about the assassination plan. Tepedino said that if Cubela “does not get what he wants, he’ll get fed up.”²⁵

They did not have to worry or wait much longer. Whatever Cubela demanded would be provided. On November 19, JMWAVE was instructed to conceal an arms cache on the Cuban coast, including rifles with telescopic sights, grenades, and pistols. As mentioned, Cubela also wanted a small, light assassination weapon— something he could use against Fidel in close quarters and that would allow him a reasonable chance of making a safe getaway. Manny Gunn went about designing what was surely the most bizarre, and laughable, assassination weapon in the history of modern espionage.²⁶

But time was short. Sanchez planned to fly to Paris in days to supply the equipment to the impatient Cubela, who was known to be returning soon to Cuba. The idea was that he could carry the weapon in a pocket and it would arouse no suspicions. Prototypes were still being tested only a day or so before Sanchez’s scheduled departure, so whatever was fabricated could not be sent securely to Paris, as Sanchez would have preferred. Gunn struggled through most of a day and night, discarding a number of unworkable models, before finally perfecting one he thought would work.²⁷

The weapon was an ordinary-looking Paper Mate pen, but instead of a ballpoint cartridge, it was fitted with a retractable syringe. Cubela would need to purchase a bottle of Black Leaf 40, a common nicotine alkaloid household poison, when he returned to Cuba, and fill the chamber of the pen. The poison could be bought over the counter; it usually was festooned with a black-and-white skull and crossbones warning on the label.²⁸

Once the device was loaded, the rest would supposedly be simple. Sanchez said, “You push the button and the needle comes out.” Cubela would only have to scratch Castro’s skin lightly for a small amount of the poison to be lethal, or so it was thought at CIA. The metal tip was so fine that Fidel might not even feel it. It would be no more noticeable than a scratch on a man’s neck from an overly starched collar. Halpern said Cubela “just barely might get away with it.”²⁹

Sanchez carried the murder weapon from Washington in the breast pocket of his suit. Late in the afternoon of November 22, he and Cubela convened alone in a Paris safe house. By then they had spent many hours together, but they had still developed no real rapport, as usually occurs in case officer–agent relationships. In my meetings with each man decades later, I could not coax either into saying anything pleasant about the other. When I interviewed Sanchez and heard his gruff insistence that Cubela had been a true and reliable asset, I wondered whether he could really have believed it.³⁰

Sanchez told Cubela where to find the cache of weapons and grilled him again about who might join him in the conspiracy. Nothing in the available records suggests that either Sanchez or FitzGerald harbored doubts as the plot, they believed, was coming to closure. In his postmortem cable, carefully worded to exclude any mention of the poison pen or its purpose, Sanchez tried to be upbeat. He was encouraged because Cubela’s “operational thinking appeared much less foggy than before.” Yet no dependable means of secure communications had been established. Most critically, headquarters was told, Cubela was “fully determined to pursue his plans to initiate a coup.”³¹

Before Sanchez got around to exhibiting the pen, he told Cubela how FitzGerald had contributed to a speech President Kennedy delivered four days earlier. It was Kennedy’s last important foreign policy address and, appropriately, it concerned Latin America. He spoke on November 18 in Miami Beach to a dinner audience that included Latin American media executives, journalists, and a large contingent of Cuban exiles. The Miami Herald reported that the president was interrupted three times by applause during the twenty-five-minute speech, each time when he spoke of the ultimate downfall of Fidel Castro.³²

Kennedy included in his remarks a faintly disguised message intended for Cubela and his putative allies. The language Des claimed to have drafted was meant to assure the plotters of American support. That unusual presidential demarche apparently had been approved after the November 12 policy meeting Kennedy chaired in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Two senior SAS staffers noted for the record that afternoon that “the president will emphasize the importance of increasing internal resistance . . . leading to a coup.” And afterward, SAS was pleased with the results. The speech, Langley believed, had significantly bolstered the coup plotters “to whom the remarks were addressed.”³³

The Miami Beach audience heard blunt talk about Cuba. Castro had “betrayed the original goals of his revolution.” He had “led a small band of conspirators who had stripped the Cuban people of their freedom.” He “handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere.” Cuba had become “a victim of foreign imperialism, a weapon to . . . subvert the other American republics.” It was the most strident and comprehensive denunciation of Castro and his policies Kennedy ever uttered while in office.

Most provocatively, he promised that when sovereignty was restored, “we will extend the hand of friendship and assistance to a Cuba whose political and economic institutions have been shaped by the will of the people.” Referring to Castro’s dictatorship, he said that “no Cuban should feel trapped.” When we met in Miami, Cubela told me he could not remember anything about the speech. But Sanchez informed headquarters that Cubela had been pleased “to read a copy” and “even more pleased to hear that Mr. Clark”—FitzGerald’s alias—had helped to prepare it.³⁴

White House sources churned the speech into a major news event. Reporters were told that Kennedy’s words were meant as a call for the Cuban people to evict Fidel. The next day, the Miami Herald wrote that “Kennedy offered hope to Cuban exiles in Florida . . . that the time is not far distant when their native land will be free again and they can go home.” Al Burt, the Herald reporter close to Ted Shackley, wrote that Kennedy’s words “seemed an appeal to elements in Cuba . . . almost an invitation to the Cuban people to throw out the Castro brothers.” The Dallas Times Herald reported that Kennedy “all but invited the Cuban people to overthrow Castro and promised them support if they do.”

In the same editions on November 19, the Dallas press for the first time carried block-by-block details of the route the president’s motorcade would follow three days later. It was then that Lee Harvey Oswald first became aware that Kennedy would pass beneath the windows of the Texas Book Depository where he worked. Oswald probably also read what Kennedy had said in Miami Beach and the Dallas paper’s interpretation of it.

It was after dark in Paris when Sanchez finally removed the Paper Mate pen from his jacket pocket. The last of Cubela’s many demands was being met. The weapon, however, was not one of Manny Gunn’s finer achievements. Sanchez remembered disdainfully: “It wasn’t that good.” Cubela agreed as soon as Sanchez began to explain how to use it. “He showed it to me; I didn’t accept it.” Neither man remembers exactly what became of the pen. Cubela told me he was sure he did not keep it and thus contradicted Cuban government accounts that, after the meeting, he tossed it into the Seine.³⁵

Cubela remembered that the rendezvous “ended abruptly with a phone call.” FitzGerald was on the line. His voice was different, emotion stifling his standard bullish grandiosity. He told Sanchez that the president had just been shot in Dallas.³⁶

Des had heard the breaking news while hosting a luncheon for a foreign diplomat at the City Tavern, a historic club in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. He was always a gregarious host, and Cuba was his obsession, so it is difficult to imagine that Castro was not a staple of the table talk that afternoon. The gathering dissolved immediately, the Agency men rushing back across the Potomac to headquarters, about fifteen minutes away. They would need to get cables out to field stations, though they had no idea yet what they would write.

The Paris meeting also broke up immediately. Sanchez said Cubela was visibly moved by the news from Dallas. As they were going out into the Parisian night, the Cuban asked him, “Why do such things happen to good people?” It may have been a sincere reaction, but knowing now of the man’s duplicity and scheming, it is difficult to believe he did not share Castro’s loathing of Kennedy. Most likely the remark was another example of his finely honed performance skills.³⁷

Another reaction was hauntingly prescient. Not long after, when reports of Oswald’s arrest first were aired by the news media and nothing was known about him, Sam Halpern commented to an SAS colleague, “I sure hope the guy was not involved in Cuba in some way.”

Fidel was at his Varadero beach house when he heard that Kennedy had been shot. He too was hosting a lunch for a distinguished foreign visitor. Jean Daniel, the lead correspondent of the progressive Parisian weekly L’Express and one of the most distinguished members of the French press corps, had been visiting the island since late October. He and Castro had already spent about two days together.

Daniel remembered there were about a dozen people—he and his wife, Michelle, Fidel, and nine or ten other Cubans—all sitting around a casual table when the phone rang. Cuba’s figurehead president was calling from Havana with the news. It was still preliminary, arriving very soon after the first bulletins about the gunfire in Texas filled American airwaves. The others heard Fidel say, “¿Como? ¿Un atentado?” “What? An assassination attempt?”³⁸

Daniel and his wife remembered Castro seeming to be genuinely shocked. She recalled that he almost immediately wanted to know who the American vice president was, as if he were already convinced that Kennedy would not survive. Soon it was learned that the president was dead, and Fidel expressed alarm. “They will have to find the assassin quickly, otherwise you watch and see, they will try to blame us.”³⁹

Why he said that cannot easily be explained. The news media had not yet publicized Oswald’s Marxist beliefs, Cuba infatuations, and trip to Mexico City. Castro may have thought he was vulnerable because of all his angry rhetoric directed at Kennedy, in particular the threatening interview with Daniel Harker eleven weeks earlier. Oswald’s threat to kill Kennedy as he was departing the Cuban consulate in Mexico must also have been on Fidel’s mind. But, assuming what Aspillaga told me about Fidel’s foreknowledge of the assassination is correct, much more was known in Havana than has ever been admitted.

INTELLIGENCE AND LAW ENFORCEMENT officers everywhere know to be skeptical of coincidences. Most of them, of course, are actual happenstance, odd convergences. Yet a coming together that appears innocent enough may have been devised with ulterior motives. Fidel arranged the Varadero luncheon with care and with the expectation that Jean Daniel would write one or more widely circulated articles.

Two soon appeared in the New Republic, an important New York weekly. The first, an eyewitness account, was entitled “When Castro Heard the News.” Because it was written by a European intellectual of unimpeachable reputation, Fidel would never be asked to explain where he was when Kennedy was killed. There would be no speculation that he might have been at DGI headquarters with Redbeard Piñeiro or in a war room at Raúl’s defense ministry. Whether he contrived it or not, the Varadero luncheon provided Fidel with an airtight alibi. “It was one of those incredible historical coincidences,” he told an interviewer in 1984.⁴⁰

Daniel’s visit proved even more fortuitous for Fidel because of another coincidence. On the day Kennedy was killed, the Frenchman was acting as the president’s unofficial emissary to explore with Castro possibilities for improving relations. Kennedy had never entrusted anyone else with such a mission. Nothing would have come of it because the chasms dividing the two countries were unbridgeable. All the same, the talks, which ranged over two days as Daniel conferred with Castro, first in Havana and then Varadero, provided Fidel with another seemingly perfect alibi that is still widely believed today. Soon after Kennedy’s death, Fidel, the Cuban media, and the DGI’s intelligence machine began to promote the legend that, with Daniel’s help, progress had been made toward a historic American-Cuban reconciliation.

Daniel had met with Kennedy in the Oval Office on October 24. The president was loquacious and charming, introducing his visitor to the First Lady and then chatting amiably about French politics. He got to the point quickly: “I’d like to talk to you about Cuba.”

He knew Daniel would be traveling there intending to interview Castro, and there were things he wanted Fidel to know. Kennedy made clear that he hoped he and Daniel could consult again in Washington to hear Castro’s responses. “Our conversation will be much more interesting when you return.” This type of backchannel communication was a typical problem-solving technique for Kennedy. His brother may have told him that FitzGerald would be meeting with Cubela a few days later; perhaps he wanted to explore a diplomatic option before it was too late.⁴¹

He hoped the clever and observant Frenchman would provide him insights and explanations, clues to the character, motives, and psychology of the leader he considered more intriguing than any other on the world stage. Daniel told me when we met forty-seven years later that he thought Kennedy had two principal reasons for enlisting him as a messenger. He believed the president had come to doubt the aggressive policies he had pursued toward Cuba and “was seeking a way out.” Further, Kennedy was puzzled by Castro. The curiosity was mutual. Daniel said, “Castro and Kennedy had a hunger about knowing the other. They were fascinated with each other.”⁴²

The démarche for Fidel’s ears only was kept secret in Washington. Kennedy knew that if word of it leaked, his Republican opponents would use it against him to great advantage. They would charge that he was going soft on his nemesis Castro. Kennedy’s friend James Reston of the New York Times had written that, with respect to Castro, “the natural instincts of the nation are against the president. Cuba is too close.” Sensitive to the political risks, Kennedy kept even his closest advisors in the dark. Neither the White House press secretary nor national security advisor knew of the meeting until after the president’s death.⁴³

Kennedy had authorized other tentative and unofficial contacts with Castro. Only one bore fruit. During a dozen meetings with Fidel, James Donovan, a garrulous New York lawyer, arranged in December 1962 for the release of the Cuban exile prisoners captured at the Bay of Pigs. At around the same time he also negotiated the repatriation of three CIA officers imprisoned after being caught red-handed installing listening devises in Havana in 1960. With these negotiations complete, Donovan reported that Fidel wanted to engage in a dialogue to reduce tensions; he was anxious to win relief from the intensifying American campaigns against him.⁴⁴

Through most of 1963 Castro signaled that supposed interest in a variety of ways. The wife of a former Dutch ambassador in Havana contacted CIA. She claimed that Fidel was “desperate for a rapprochement because of the economic chaos in Cuba.” Richard Helms compiled a list of a half dozen agent reports all suggesting Cuban interest in a dialogue. One said that Castro was indicating that he wanted better relations because of pressure from Soviet leader Khrushchev. But he was only adopting a conciliatory pose, the source said, “for the time being.” Other approaches were made through Lisa Howard, an American journalist whom Donovan introduced to Castro, and William Attwood, accredited as an American ambassador to the United Nations. None of these straws in the wind brought either negotiations or the pause in aggression that Fidel desired.⁴⁵

Daniel’s first meeting with Castro had been on the night of November 20 in Havana. “I had practically given up hope,” he wrote, “when on the evening of what I thought was to be my departure date, Fidel came to my hotel.” The usually nocturnal Castro arrived at the Havana Libre—previously the Havana Hilton—at the busy corner of L and 23 Streets in the old Vedado neighborhood two hours before midnight. Knowing of assassination plotting, his personal security was elaborate. Eight to twelve armed and ready men traveled with him wherever he went. Among his guards was one who prepared all his meals and always served him, even in restaurants.⁴⁶

Castro and Daniel talked in the Frenchman’s cramped room for six hours. They faced each other across a small table and later sitting together on the bed. At times Fidel perched on the arm of a chair, his hands in constant motion. Knowing that Cubela was on his way to the rendezvous with Sanchez in Paris where he likely would receive a murder weapon, he must have wondered if Daniel was bringing a belligerent ultimatum from the White House. What hypocrisy would Kennedy be peddling now?

At first, the message was conciliatory. Daniel said Kennedy wanted Fidel to know that he had sympathized with his original revolutionary objectives and deplored the Batista dictatorship. The corrupt, Mafia-connected ruler had embodied all the worst historical sins the United States had committed in its dealings with Latin America. Kennedy asked Daniel to convey his belief that no other country had suffered as much humiliation and exploitation as pre-Castro Cuba. It was an adroit introduction that played well to Castro’s ego and his interpretation of history.⁴⁷

As Daniel remembered when we met in New York, Kennedy had asked him to convey two important points. He wanted to assure Castro that “I don’t care about communism. I have good relations with Tito in Yugoslavia and with Sékou Touré in Guinea. . . . I have only one enemy. It is communism in the Soviet Union and their allies.” Daniel remembered Kennedy adding that “I am indifferent to Castro being a communist.” The president could deal with Castro if he was independent of Moscow and stopped intervening in Latin America. He had made the same points in his Miami Beach speech. Those were the only problems, he said. “As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible.”⁴⁸

Kennedy mainly had Tito in mind. The Yugoslav leader had broken with the Soviet Union in 1948, declaring himself an independent Marxist. Later he was a founder of the nonaligned bloc of nations and maintained cordial relations with both Washington and Moscow. Kennedy reminded Daniel during their Oval Office meeting that he had greeted Tito just three days earlier, “right here,” on the South Lawn of the White House. “And our discussions were most positive.”

Could Castro somehow be induced into becoming the Caribbean Tito? The possibility had been on Kennedy’s mind for more than a year. In July 1962 he had mused with Herbert Matthews about how Castro might “turn Tito.” The journalist recalled that Kennedy was attracted to the idea and wanted to know what “we could use as bait.” The nonaligned Marxist Touré, the president of Guinea, a small country on the west coast of Africa, was another example of what Kennedy had in mind.⁴⁹

No one who really understood Fidel believed, however, that he could ever “turn Tito.” Kennedy’s top Latin America advisor, Assistant Secretary of State Edwin Martin, a shrewd policy bureaucrat with a deep understanding of Castro, had warned a few months earlier that there was no chance Fidel would ever change his stripes. He is “a true revolutionary,” Martin told a high-level policy group; there is “no possibility” that he would ever defect from the Soviet fold. And even if he were to move closer to the United States, it would be for tactical and fleeting reasons. “He would not stay bought.” The implication was that Castro could not be trusted. He would renege on any deal in which he benefited from American concessions. Furthermore, according to Martin, how could the United States replace the Soviet Union as Cuba’s economic benefactor? The annual tab amounted to about $5 billion.⁵⁰

The intelligence community was of a similar mind. A June 1963 national intelligence estimate acknowledged “fragmentary indications of an interest” by Fidel in better relations, but only as one of numerous alternatives he was considering. He was motivated, the analysts wrote, by the hope of reducing the danger of US intervention and to gain time to consolidate the regime. Those responsible for the estimate had scant knowledge of the CIA covert war but were correct in attributing Castro’s interest in dialogue to his fear of the quickening pace of American aggression.⁵¹

As the late-night hours at the Havana Libre melted away, it became clear that Edwin Martin and the analysts were right. Kennedy’s overture through Daniel had fallen on deaf ears. Fidel would not become another Tito or Touré. He would not stop supporting and encouraging Latin American guerrillas and revolutionaries. Just a few weeks earlier he had told Matthews, the New York Times reporter, “[O]f course we do subversion, the training of guerrillas, propaganda! Why not? This is exactly what you are doing to us.”⁵²

Castro would never forswear Marxist beliefs or the alliance with Moscow. He snapped at Daniel, “I don’t want to discuss our ties with the Soviet Union. I find this indecent.” The revolution and its ideology were irreversible. Fidel’s hatred of the United States was implacable. He told Daniel that he and Cuba must be “accepted as we are.” That was his bottom line, and it never changed during all his years in power.⁵³

By that dictum, any Cuban concessions to improve relations would be tactical, on the margins. Havana would never feel bound to constrain its revolutionary foreign policies or venomous anti-American propaganda. The revolution was irreversible. It would continue to support like-minded revolutionaries in Latin America and anywhere else. Not a penny would be paid in compensation for the confiscated American properties in Cuba. The large Soviet military force still on the island would stay. Even if relations improved, Cuban intelligence would continue to target Washington policy makers and Miami exiles and to run aggressive active measures campaigns against American interests.

Fidel’s intransigence about his core beliefs had been manifest many times before. In an anniversary speech on July 26 he shouted to a massive crowd in Revolutionary Plaza, “What do they want? For us to make some ideological concessions? We will not . . . they will have to negotiate with the Cuban Marxist-Leninist government.” British novelist Graham Greene, author of Our Man in Havana, a black comedy about the foibles of intelligence operatives, was there that day. He was amazed with Fidel’s ability simultaneously to entertain and to indoctrinate the masses. When Castro mentioned the Bay of Pigs, Greene wrote, a young man “went down on fours in front of me to make pig noises.”⁵⁴

Anti-imperialist rancor crowned the strategic position Fidel hewed to for the rest of his life. Twenty-three years later, Kennedy’s Boswell, historian and White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, visited Cuba and spoke with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, then the third most influential figure in the regime. Rodríguez told him, “[W]e want normal relations with the United States, but normal doesn’t necessarily mean friendly . . . we would like coexistence on the basis of mutual respect.” It was another rendition of Fidel’s “accept us as we are.”⁵⁵

Over the years, Castro rejected earnest petitions from at least four subsequent American presidents. It was always for the same reasons. Anti-Yankee animosities dominated Fidel’s worldview. He had always sought grandeur on the world stage, fame, power, and glory as a leader of Latin American and third-world revolutionary causes. His vision reflected a warrior’s hubris, the desire to emulate the conquerors and heroes he had revered since childhood: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon. As Fidel had said in a speech in January 1963, “Mr. Kennedy, there is much blood between us.”⁵⁶

Perpetual confrontation with the United States was the legitimizing prerequisite for his titanic ambitions. Castro knew he could never be a transcendental figure on the world stage if he was perceived as shackled to the United States. Protracted David-and-Goliath conflict with the American superpower would be inevitable until some future president might just accept him on his own terms.

FIDEL WOULD HAVE TALKED all through the night at the Havana Libre, but Jean Daniel was exhausted. When they adjourned it was with the understanding that Fidel would be back after dawn to take the Daniels to Varadero. The next morning, at the wheel of a jeep, Castro drove eastward about seventy-five miles along Cuba’s north coast to the beach house. Security was heavy. The defector Rodríguez Menier says that in those days, Castro was always accompanied on road trips by a truck bristling with communications gear and another carrying a 35 mm cannon to protect against possible air attack.⁵⁷

The conversations about Kennedy continued through the rest of that day and the next. With Fidel’s rejection of Kennedy’s Tito proposal, the Frenchman’s mission was essentially complete. In the last few days of his life, Kennedy remained at the same impasse with Castro as before. There was to be no exit from their lethal conflict. And there probably would not have been any meeting of the minds if Kennedy had been elected to a second term in 1964. Neither man had the slightest intention of compromising on issues of fundamental importance.

Yet a myth about Castro’s and Kennedy’s maneuverings with each other in the fall of 1963 has persisted. Respected historians and analysts have argued that before the assassination in Dallas, the two leaders were close to reconciling. Some even seem to have concluded that rapprochement would have been nearly inevitable in a second term. Robert Dallek, a prestigious Kennedy biographer—who makes no claim to being a Cuba or Fidel Castro expert—asks: “Who can doubt that a Cuban-American accommodation might have been an achievement of Kennedy’s second four years?”⁵⁸

Similarly, Ted Sorensen, an intimate Kennedy advisor and speechwriter, wrote in 2008 that Kennedy gradually acquired a “grudging respect for Castro” and believed that one day they would have “enjoyed a personal dialogue in which private mutual admiration might well have played a part.” He raised the Tito possibility. Sorensen knew Kennedy well, but not Castro, and failed to explain how Fidel could have been persuaded to abandon everything he believed in. Sadly, Sorensen was taken in by decades of Cuban disinformation and wishful thinking. Sam Halpern described the possibility of a Kennedy-Castro rapprochement in 1963 as “sheer, utter nonsense.”⁵⁹

The belief in a Kennedy-Castro reconciliation has thrived because Cuban media and intelligence have been masterful and unrelenting. After November 22, 1963, Fidel almost never spoke or wrote about Kennedy without asserting that they were on the verge of a rapprochement. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he claims that he admired and respected the president. These positions have been pushed by Cuban illegals, influence and penetration agents, and by DGI active measures aimed mainly at American audiences.

In an autobiographical interview a few years ago, Fidel lavished praise on Kennedy, saying his death “touched me and grieved me.” Shameless, he told John F. Kennedy Jr. in Havana of his admiration for the president, “how brave he had been” and how relations might have been repaired if he had lived. These themes have cascaded in Castro’s rhetoric and through Cuban media and intelligence programs for nearly fifty years. Their objective has been to exonerate Fidel and his intelligence chieftains of any responsibility for Kennedy’s death.⁶⁰

But during his conversations with Daniel, CIA assassination plots against him were much on Fidel’s mind. For no apparent reason during the late-night session at the Havana Libre, he told the French reporter that he was not the least fearful for his life. Danger was “his natural milieu.” If he was murdered, that would only enhance his revolutionary causes and strengthen his allies in Latin America, he said. At another point in their discussions, when he was speaking of Kennedy, Fidel said, “Personally, I consider him responsible for everything.”⁶¹

He volunteered even more cogent language demonstrating his knowledge of the plots against him. He told Daniel, “They have tried everything against us, everything, absolutely everything, but we are still standing.” When I met with Daniel in April 2010, I asked him what he thought Fidel had meant by this last comment. “It is very clear,” he responded without hesitation. “Fidel wanted me to know that the Americans had tried to assassinate him. Yes, the journalist I was, I knew what he meant.”⁶²

Daniel was ninety years of age when we talked, although he looked and acted fifteen years younger. He had traveled to New York from Paris to be the keynote speaker at a tribute to his old friend Albert Camus. His memories of his long-ago meetings with Fidel were still vivid.