Authors: Lamar Waldron
the Secret Service, the FBI, and even Bobby’s own Justice Department
were excluded from domestic aspects of the planning, since member-
ship on the secret subcommittees was kept so small. Some meetings of
the Special Group included only three or four people. Even today, large
portions of their meeting notes from the summer and fall of 1963 are still
heavily censored, such as those from November 15, 1963. Other notes
from that time period that aren’t heavily censored, such as those from
the November 6, 1963, meeting, often say to “see special minutes for
additional items.” Those “special minutes” have never been released, a
sign of the secrecy that remains even after more than four decades.44
Chapter Two
By mid-November 1963, officials in Washington were putting the finish-
ing touches on the final draft of the “Plan for a Coup in Cuba.” While the
plans were being approved by JFK’s top military leaders, like Joint Chiefs
of Staff Chairman Maxwell Taylor and Defense Intelligence Agency
Chief General Joseph Carroll, much of the actual work was being done
by Army Secretary Cyrus Vance. Helping Vance with some of the plan-
ning was his assistant, Joseph Califano, and Califano’s aide, Lieutenant
Colonel Alexander Haig. According to Harry Williams, Vance was fully
aware of Almeida’s role. Califano and Haig have gone to great lengths
in their autobiographies and public comments to stress that Vance was
privy to more information about the Cuban operations than they were,
and have never acknowledged knowing about Almeida. However, Haig
and Califano acknowledge freely that they worked extensively on covert
Cuban operations in the summer and fall of 1963, and their names show
up in several “Plan for a Coup in Cuba” documents.
Their public comments help to describe the situation at the time.
On ABC’s
Nightline,
Haig said that Bobby Kennedy was running the
secret Cuban operations “hour by hour. I was part of it, as deputy to
Joe Califano and military assistant to . . . Cy Vance, the Secretary of the
Army, [who] was [presiding] over the State Department, the CIA, and
the National Security Council [when it came to Cuba]. I was intimately
involved.”
Califano’s autobiography wasn’t published until 2004, and in it he
says, “Presidential demands for a covert program to [eliminate] the
Soviet military presence in Cuba . . . intensified. Helping develop this
covert program and direct the Defense Department’s role in it occupied
much of my time in 1963.”1 Califano goes on to say, “I felt I was working
directly for the Attorney General and through him, for the President, and
with one exception I enthusiastically joined the administration’s effort to
topple Castro.” Califano says that exception was a suggestion to assas-
sinate Fidel, but he notes that at that meeting, “the CIA representatives
sat silent.” Califano later bemoans the fact that the Warren “Commission
was not informed of any of the efforts of . . . the CIA and Robert Kennedy
to eliminate Castro and stage a coup” in the fall of 1963.2
Those coup plans eventually grew to more than eighty pages by
November 1963, and those didn’t even include the US military’s detailed
invasion plans for Cuba. All of the quotes in the following brief sum-
mary are from the coup plans that Cyrus Vance sent to General Maxwell
Taylor. CIA and State had also contributed to, and signed off on, the
plans, which call for the leaders of the coup to “have some power base in
the Cuban army,” and to be in contact with the United States prior to the
coup. The US would also “seek the cooperation of selected Cuban exile
leaders.” The whole point of the coup would be to stage a seemingly
internal “palace coup in Cuba [that would] neutralize the top echelon of
Cuban leadership.” The term “neutralize” is simply a nice way of saying
“kill.” The plans stress that “from a political viewpoint, it is important . . .
the revolt appear genuine and not open to the charge of being a facade
for a forcible US overthrow of Castro [since] a well-planned and suc-
cessful ‘rescue’ of a revolt could be made politically acceptable” to US
allies and the Soviets.3
The coup plans say that after Castro’s death, President Kennedy
would “warn [the] Soviets not to intervene,” an important consideration
since “twelve to thirteen thousand Soviet military personnel of all kinds
remain [in Cuba].”4 The leaders of the coup “would have announced via
radio and other means the . . . establishment of a Provisional Govern-
ment. They would have appealed to the US for recognition and support,
particularly for air cover and a naval blockade, ostensibly to make cer-
tain that the Soviets do not intervene but actually, by prearrangement,
to immobilize the Cuban Air Force and Navy.”5
After “completion of such initial air attacks as may be necessary, pro-
vision will be made for the rapid, incremental introduction of balanced
forces, to include full-scale invasion if . . . necessary.” The plans also say
that “US military forces employed against Cuba should be accompa-
nied by US military–trained free Cubans.”6 Several hundred such Cuban
exiles had been trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Jackson, South
Carolina, and were ready to be deployed by mid-November 1963. If the
coup went well, it was hoped those Cuban exile US troops might be the
only US forces required.7
The United States wanted support from its allies, and the Kennedys’
ultimate goal was a free and democratic Cuba. The plans say, “The OAS
[Organization of American States] will send representatives to the island
24
LEGACY OF SECRECY
to assist the Provisional Government in preparing for and conduct of
free elections.”8
Among the Joint Chiefs, evidence indicates that only Maxwell Tay-
lor and DIA Chief Joseph Carroll were fully informed about Almeida.
Others, like Air Force Chief General Curtis LeMay, were too hawkish
and close to JFK’s conservative adversaries in Congress to be trusted
to know everything, especially about a plan that might be canceled if
there was a breakthrough with the secret peace feelers to Castro. As JFK
biographer Richard Reeves discovered, JFK was worried about the pos-
sibility of a military coup by a US general if he was perceived to have
suffered another disaster like the Bay of Pigs.9
Though military leaders like General Carroll had a greater role in the
coup than the CIA, some of the CIA’s activities caused him problems. A
CIA memo describes General Carroll’s frustration with the CIA regard-
ing the coup, a dissatisfaction that the General expressed to a Cuban
exile in a meeting held in a car in November 1963. Meeting about the
upcoming coup in a car, instead of at the Pentagon, was apparently for
security reasons, but that didn’t prevent General Carroll’s complaints
about the CIA from being reported to that very agency.10 Such domestic
spying was all too common in those days, and General Carroll was part
of that apparatus: His DIA was a newly created umbrella organization
that was supposed to coordinate the activities of services like Army
Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, which later Congressional inves-
tigations found had been involved in domestic surveillance for many
years.11 While the CIA had been tasked with getting more US assets into
Cuba prior to the coup, some of those assets were current or former US
military personnel who were also involved with the CIA. At least one of
them was under “tight surveillance” in November 1963, as he had been
since his return from the Soviet Union in 1962. As we first revealed in
2005, Naval Intelligence was maintaining phone, mail, and visual sur-
veillance on Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife. Since Naval Intelligence
lacked the resources to maintain such surveillance in many areas, they
relied on assistance from the FBI and the CIA. Our source, who main-
tained reports about Oswald and other domestic surveillance targets,
says that Oswald’s folder contained a CIA phone number to call if he
were ever involved in any problem.12
Today, the vast majority of Americans have no idea that in the days and
weeks before JFK’s trip to Dallas, Bobby Kennedy had a secret subcom-
mittee developing plans for what to do if a US official were assassinated.
The development of “Contingency Plans” for dealing with the possible
“assassination of American officials” grew out of planning for the coup,
and involved many of the same officials. This planning had begun in
September 1963, to deal with possible retaliation by Castro, if he learned
that JFK and Bobby were plotting to overthrow him. However, since
some of the officials working on these Contingency Plans didn’t know
about Almeida, they no doubt viewed the issue far differently, and with
far less urgency, than the few who did. Only three of the many files this
subcommittee generated have been declassified, though we also spoke
with two members of the Kennedy administration who were familiar
with the plans.13
One of the sources was an official who worked on the plans but had
not been told about Commander Almeida. The other source was a Ken-
nedy aide who saw the plans after they were drafted, but also knew
about Almeida and the imminent coup. While declassified plans show
that the subcommittee believed the “assassination of American officials”
to be “likely” in the fall of 1963, they considered assassination attempts
“unlikely in the US.”14 If Fidel found out about US plans and decided to
retaliate, they felt he would risk assassinating an American official only
outside the United States—for example, in a Latin American country.
Bobby and the officials working on the plans, especially those who
knew about Almeida, were considering how the United States should
react if, for example, the US ambassador to Panama was assassinated
and his murder appeared to be linked somehow to Cuba and the upcom-
ing coup. One of Vance’s memos about the coup stresses the importance
of having certain types of “information . . . to enable the President to
make” viable decisions so they could avoid any situation where the
President “would lack essential, evaluated information . . . but would
at the same time be under heavy pressure to respond quickly.”15
Bobby and the other officials didn’t want JFK to be under pressure
from the public, the press, or Congress to take hasty action against Cuba,
if early reports pointed toward Cuban involvement in the death of a US
official in Latin America. A hasty US military attack against Cuba could
provoke devastating retaliation from Russia. Also, imagine the disaster
if the United States started bombing Havana, only to have evidence
emerge proving the US official had been killed not by Fidel, but in a
routine robbery.
To avoid those problems, the Kennedy aide cautiously indicated
some of the conditions necessary for JFK to make an informed, rea-
soned response to the apparent assassination of a US official in Latin
26
LEGACY OF SECRECY
America: First, the US would need to control and limit initial publicity,
to keep the news media from generating an outcry for an immediate
military response against Cuba. To protect Almeida, any possible links
between the assassination and the coup plan would have to be hidden
from the press. US investigating agencies would need to take control of
the investigation from local authorities as soon as possible, including
gaining possession of important evidence. The autopsy would have to
be conducted at a secure US military facility, to ensure that information
couldn’t be leaked to the press. All of this would give JFK the time and
information needed to make an appropriate response.
In the third week of November 1963, the Cuba Contingency planning
was still going on, even though most of those working on it hadn’t been
told crucial information: that officials had uncovered plots to assassinate
JFK during his planned motorcades in Chicago on November 2 and in
Tampa on November 18. In hindsight, it’s hard to believe that most of
those working on plans to deal with the assassination of a US official
weren’t told of the Chicago and Tampa attempts to assassinate JFK, espe-
cially since each appeared to have possible links to Cuba. However, as
Chapter 5 documents, both attempts were kept out of the press because
of all the secrecy surrounding the upcoming coup. Apparently, JFK and
Bobby decided that sharing information about the attempts with the
entire subcommittee—and potentially their supervisors, aides, and
secretaries—could compromise the security of the entire coup plan.
In contrast to all the secret planning that JFK and Bobby hoped would
never be revealed, the Kennedy brothers were also concerned with
building positive publicity about the aftermath of the coup. If every-
thing went according to plan, it would appear as if JFK had responded