As a first step, later that April, Harvey
ordered Rosselli to break off all contacts with Maheu and
Giancana. Then he gave Rosselli four new lethal pills which
"would work anywhere and at any time with anything." Rosselli,
who was to use his putative Cuban agents to slip a pill
into Fidel Castro's beverage, volunteered that he would
use the others pill on Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, and
Che Guevara, his revolutionary colleague. He also asked
Harvey for a cache of rifles, pistols, radios, and explosives
for a three-man Cuban team that he claimed was now preparing
to penetrate Castro's bodyguards. Harvey personally drove
the cache in a U-Haul truck to a parking lot in Miami, where
it was picked up by Rosselli's men. Despite this bravado,
the ZR/RIFLE phase of the assassination plans did not fare
any better than the earlier plots. The pills again failed
to reach their target, and the weaponry disappeared.
That November, as part of the deal by
Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to remove the
Soviet missiles that ended the confrontation, which almost
ignited a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, Kennedy pledged
not to invade or infiltrate Cuba, and Operation Mongoose
was nominally ended. There was also a change in nomenclature
and personnel. The name of the CIA unit responsible for
covert actions against Cuba was changed from JM WAVE to
the Special Affairs Section, and Harvey was replaced in
early 1963 by Desmond Fitzsgerald. The mafia connection
was also dispensed with Harvey telling Rosseli the operation
was over.
Desmond FitzGerald, a socially adept
veteran of the clandestine cold war, whose rugged good looks
and name led many people in Washington to mistakenly believe
he was a distant relative of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, ran
things very differently from Harvey . He preferred the technological
ingenuity of CIA's workshop to underworld hitmen. After
it was established from Castro's psychological profile that
he was avid diver and sea shell collector, hehad the division
build a booby-trapped seashell that would explode if someone
tried to remove it from the ocean floor. The idea was to
place it where Castro frequently swam underwater in the
hope that he would see it and attempt to bring it to the
surface. If so, he would be blown up, and it would appear
he had been killed by a derelict mine. It would leave no
witnesses, and unlike hitmen, no assassin that could be
captured. And if he ignored it, nothing would be lost. The
workshop, however, decided that the construction of a lethal
sea-shell that would not explode accidentally or be lost
was technically too difficult. The CIA went back to the
drawing board.
The next idea out of the workshop was
a killer gift for Castro a wet suit whose breathing apparatus
was impregnated with tubercle bacilli and other deadly germs.
The concept was that the bacilli and other evidence would
be destroyed by the seawater, and the Cubans would not be
able to determine how Castro contracted tuberculosis. Again,
this device would leave no witnesses. The problem was to
find a means of delivering it. At the time, James Donovan,
an American lawyer, was negotiating the release of the Cuban
exiles captured in the Bay of Pigs disaster. Castro had
apparently let Donovan know that he would like a wet suit.
The CIA's idea was that somehow Donovan, who was not privy
to its machinations, would give the contaminated suit to
Castro. But before it could be delivered, Donovan, acting
on his own, coincidentally gave Castro a pristine wet suit.
The plan then had to be aborted.
All along, the Kennedy administration
had been struggling to find a means to get rid of Castro
by one means or another, and even though Kennedy had pledged
to cease its attacks on Cuba to end the missile crises,
Robert Kennedy continued to press the CIA for tangible results.
Richard Helms testified that Robert Kennedy frequently bypassed
the chain of command and directly called FitzGerald (as
he had previously called Harbey). The pressure described
by Helms was relentless. So when Major Roland Cubela came
to Brazil with a Cuban delegation and, on September 7, 1963,
made contact with a CIA officer and volunteered to kill
Fidel Castro, it was an offer Fitzgerald was in no position
to refuse.
Cubela was already known to the CIA.
In late March 1961, when the planning for the Bay of Pigs
invasion was moving into high gear, he had approached the
CIA and offered to defect, but little came of that initial
contact. The CIA knew he had the access for the mission.
He was a personal friend of Castro's and saw him in the
privacy of his office as well as at government functions.
He also had experience as an assassin. Before Castro came
to power in 1959, Cubela had killed Batista's chief of military
intelligence, Blanco Rico, on behalf of Castro. To be sure,
the SAS' counterintelligence chief had concluded that Cubela
was "insecure." Nevertheless, Fitzsgerald decided the rewards
outweighed the risks.
Cubela had made an extraordinary request
that the CIA case officer in Brazil reported to FitzGerald.
Cubela, now code-named AM/LASH, wanted to meet personally
with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and be assured that
the Kennedy Administration was behind the operation. Such
a meeting was out of the question, but FitzGerald, ever
resourceful, sought an alternative way of satisfying Cubela's
demand. With the approval of his superiors in the CIA chain
of command, he arranged to meet personally with Cubela and
claim to be acting as a special emissary for Robert Kennedy.
The contact plan for the meeting stated:
"FitzGerald will represent himself as personal representative
of Robert F. Kennedy who traveled to [Paris] for specific
purpose of meeting AM/LASH and giving him assurances of
full support with the change of the present government."
Although FitzGerald would not use his real name, he was
physically recognizable from press photographs and identifiable
as a social friend of the Kennedys. Top-ranking executives
of the CIA usually did not meet operatives themselves that
was the function of case officers but in this situation,
FitzGerald made an exception. Their first meeting took place
on October 29th 1963. FitzGerald explained he had been sent
by Robert Kennedy. To further convince the assassin of his
bona fides, FitzGerald wrote a "signal" into a Presidential
speech, a phrase that described the Castro regime as a "small
band of conspirators" that needed to be "removed" which
would serve as an unambiguous alert to Cubela when President
Kennedy himself delivered those very words, which he did
in Miami on November 18th. The next meeting, where FitzGerald
would deliver a weapon, was scheduled in Paris.
That meeting took place in a hotel room
in Paris in the late afternoon of November 22nd. FitzGerald
arrived with Cubela's case officer. He handed over the ingeniously
crafted poison pen to Cubela and explained that the longer-range
weapon, the rifle with telescopic sights, was en route to
Cuba. It was only at the end of that star-crossed rendezvous
that FitzGerald learned that his commander-in-chief, and
friend, had been gunned down in Dallas by another assassin
using a rifle with telescopic sights. So ended the thousand
days of the Kennedy Administration, and, with Lyndon Johnson's
succession, so ended the CIA's assassination attempts against
Castro, all of which turned out to be ineffectual.
How much did Castro know about these
plots at the time? The interview in which Castro stated
that he knew the American government was attempting to murder
Cuban leaders and suggested that, unless they ceased, he
would retaliate in kind, took place on September 7, 1963
only hours after his long-time associate Cubela had received,
in Brazil, confirmation of the plots from the CIA's willingness
to recruit him. Unless the timing was a remarkable coincidence,
Castro appears to have known about Cubela supposedly secret
liaison with the CIA. And if that was the case, he could
also have learned that the CIA was constructing sophisticated
weapons to poison him and shipping sniper's rifles to Cuba
to shoot him. He could also have known that the Kennedys
were sufficiently involved to send a personal representative
to reassure the assassin a representative close enough to
President Kennedy to write a signal into his speech. Castro
would then himself have been delivering a message to the
Kennedys with the timing of his extraordinary interview
on September 7th.
Cubela's motives entangling the CIA in
yet another assassination plot, and attempting to provoke
Robert Kennedy to give his personal seal of approval, remain
murky. After the plans were called off, Cubela returned
to Havana rather than defecting to the U.S. The fact that
he was never prosecuted by the Cubans for attempting the
assassination he was proposing to the CIA, even though it
became public knowledge, suggests he may have been acting
on behalf of Castro to determine the involvement of the
upper echelons of the American government or even to gain
evidence in the form of traceable weapons made in the CIA's
work shop. In 1966, Cubela was convicted for post-1964 subversion
in Cuba, but unlike more than 500 other Cuban officials
who were executed for similar crimes, he was granted clemency
when Castro personally intervened on his behalf. After a
prison sentence, he was allowed to resettle in Spain in
1977, where he has lived ever since.
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