Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (28 page)

Charles
Murret was more than the “steamship clerk” he was painted by his family in testimony to the Warren Commission. His name had cropped up as early as 1944 in a survey of vice and corruption in New Orleans. An FBI report named him as being prominent in illegal bookmaking activities. Murret was for years an associate of a leader of organized crime in New Orleans, Sam Saia. The Internal Revenue Service identified Saia as one of the most powerful gambling figures in Louisiana. According to Crime Commission director Kohn, he “had the reputation of being very close to Carlos Marcello.”

For the fatherless Oswald, Murret had been the nearest there was in his life to a father figure. He had actually lived with the Murrets for a while when he was three, and later often saw them on weekends. He had visited them while serving in the Marine Corps and, most significantly, saw a lot of his uncle in the New Orleans period before the assassination. He stayed with the Murrets for a while after his arrival in the city from Dallas, and Murret lent Oswald money.

When Oswald was arrested following the street fracas with Carlos Bringuier, it was the Murrets he called for help in getting bail. Only their daughter was at home when he got through on the telephone, but she contacted “a family friend,” one Emile Bruneau. Bruneau, says an FBI report, in turn, contacted “someone else” who duly arranged Oswald’s release.

Bruneau, who reportedly admitted to the Assassinations Committee that he did indeed help, was described by Crime Commission director Kohn as “a big-time gambler.” He was also, like Oswald’s uncle Charles, an associate of one Nofio Pecora. Pecora, as we shall see, may have received a telephone call from Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, less than a month before the Kennedy assassination.
Pecora, according to the Assassinations Committee Report, was “a longtime Marcello lieutenant.”

Oswald’s mother was sensitive about her family connections. During her Assassinations Committee interviews, she “declined to discuss her past activities at any length, refusing to respond to various questions.” She would not say if she knew whether her brother-in-law Murret was acquainted with Marcello.

Nothing in Oswald’s adult history suggests he felt empathy for Mafia criminals. Yet his family’s connections, his apparent association with Marcello henchman David Ferrie, and the identity of those who arranged his release after the street fracas, cannot be ignored. The Mob, clearly, had every opportunity to become aware of Oswald, the posturing leftist. That becomes all the more ominous in light of the allegation that Carlos Marcello spoke of planning the President’s murder, of “setting up a nut to take the blame.”

None of this need detract from the suspicion that, while in New Orleans, Oswald was the tool of an anti-Castro intelligence operation. Former U.S. senator Richard Schweiker, whose Intelligence Committee investigation did the groundwork for the subsequent House Assassinations Committee probe, saw the information on New Orleans assembled for the first edition of this book—the material on 544 Camp Street in particular—as major progress. “It means,” he said, “that for the first time in the whole Kennedy assassination investigation, we have evidence which places at 544 Camp Street intelligence agents, Lee Oswald, the Mob, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. It puts all these elements together.”

By the time New Orleans moved into the humid autumn of 1963, the
disparate threads of assassination conspiracy did seem to come together. The days were slipping by toward tragedy in Dallas, and—to many of those who now saw President Kennedy as an obstacle, even an enemy—his words and overt actions only served to exacerbate a chronic grievance.

The Cuban Conundrum

“Enmities
between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever.”

—President Kennedy, June 10, 1963

T
he President stood in the open air, bareheaded as always, to address a throng of young people. It was graduation day at American University in Washington, DC, and the speech was the most significant he ever made on foreign policy. Kennedy told his listeners he intended to address the most important topic on Earth, “world peace,” and his words indicated a major shift in the policy of head-on confrontation with Communism. “If we cannot now end our differences,” the President said, “at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was signaling that nuclear war must be made a remote possibility, the tensions of the Cold War eased. A month later, U.S. and British representatives signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that banned nuclear-bomb tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space. Announcing it, the President said: “Let us, if we can, get back from the
shadows of war and seek out the way of peace… . Let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.”

In 1963, to the forces of extreme conservatism in the United States, these words and actions seemed a dangerous deviation. To many Cuban exiles and their backers, it appeared to signal further betrayal of freedom’s cause. For many years, the scenario painted by Kennedy hagiographers was of a president—determined to set the nation on a new course—opposed by plotters scheming to sabotage that policy and provoke confrontation with Havana and its Soviet patrons. Over the years, a more complex dynamic has emerged.

As of early spring 1963, things looked clear-cut enough. Alpha 66, one of the most aggressive of the exile groups, carried out a seaborne raid on a Cuban port and shot up a Soviet army installation and a Soviet freighter. Coming within months of the Missile Crisis, this was dangerously provocative. Then, in defiance of the President’s demand to desist, the same group made two further attacks. With Moscow protesting vehemently, Kennedy moved to disassociate himself from the raids.

All along the Florida coast, U.S. authorities strove to interdict military activity by “freelance” groups like Alpha 66. The President did not say he was closing down all operations, only those not authorized by Washington. It seemed, though, that there no longer were many authorized missions. There were a few approved “pinprick” attacks in June, reportedly designed not so much to hurt Cuba as to warn Castro against interfering in other Latin American countries. Then, from mid-August, there was a steady tattoo of light airplane attacks, more commando raids, and sabotage. Castro stepped up his broadcast harangues, calling Kennedy “a ruffian … a horseman riding from error to error, from folly to folly.”

Who
ordered which raids is hard to disentangle without a full analysis of all the reports of the CIA, its auxiliaries in the armed forces, and the Special Group on Cuba overseen by Robert Kennedy.
1
The hagiographers’ line has been that—though the Group did approve sabotage operations right up to and after the President’s assassination—things were winding down, the will to overthrow Castro was evaporating. The truth may have been otherwise.

Throughout that summer, in camps on the Florida mainland and on islets and cays off the coast, exile fighters continued training for action under CIA control. According to a memoir by an Army officer seconded to the CIA as an instructor, Captain Bradley Ayers, the training was intensive and purposeful.
2
The authorities would never admit involvement, Ayers said. “One of the splinter, independent Cuban exile groups would publicly take credit for the raids.”

By late summer 1963, according to Ayers, he was training above all small teams of commandos “to infiltrate Cuba, reach human targets, and assassinate them. Anyone in a senior position in government was fair game, and it reached down to the provincial heads, police chiefs and so on. But the principal target, we knew, was Castro—there was no secret about that amongst our people.”

Ayers’ account and a body of other information suggest that the President and his brother, the Attorney General, continued secretly to authorize far more activity—ruthless activity—than has ever been acknowledged. At the start of his assignment, in the spring of 1963, Ayers had been briefed at the CIA by General Victor Krulak, a personal friend of the President and a member of the Special Group. In the summer, according to Ayers, Robert
Kennedy personally visited CIA personnel at their base in the Everglades. In the late fall, he flew by helicopter to one of the clandestine sites where assassination teams were trained.

Some exile leaders still talked that summer of “a new all-out drive” and the “ultimate invasion.” Were they blowhards, deceived by empty assurances from Washington? Not so, thought one of the exiles Robert Kennedy took under his wing. Roberto San Román, brother of Pepe, the man who had led the exiles onto the beach at the Bay of Pigs, said in 1994, “We were never closer to liberation than we were in November 1963… . Even if it was just for their own ego, Kennedy and his brother—whom I knew well—wanted to get even with Castro.”

Dean Rusk, who served as Secretary of State throughout the presidency, echoed that view in an interview with the author shortly before his death in 1994. “The Kennedys,” Rusk said, “had an implacable hostility toward Castro, and they didn’t let up.”

No paper proof has ever surfaced showing that the President or his brother authorized the assassination of Fidel Castro. A document that surfaced in 2012—in the form of notes made by a secretary of a 1962 phone call to Secretary Rusk from CIA Director McCone—comes close. Both men had been at a meeting earlier in the day at which there had been agreement on unspecified strong measures to be taken against the Castro regime—a meeting that Robert Kennedy had attended.

McCone, a staunch Catholic who is known to have recoiled from involvement in murder, spoke elliptically. “M[cCone],” Rusk’s secretary noted, “said the question came up this morning in connection with an individual that should not come up in m[eetin]gs. M[cCone] does not think we should countenance talking or thinking about that.” The “individual,” it is reasonable from the context to surmise, was
Castro. “That,” McCone surely knew Rusk would understand, was “assassination.”
3
(See facsimile below.)

The notion that the Kennedys approved the concept of Castro’s murder—for all Kennedy loyalists’ denials—has been bolstered by books published in the past decade or so.
4

Over many months, the CIA conducted a covert relationship with a senior Cuban who, the CIA believed, had turned traitor. This was Rolando Cubela, a hero of the revolution who had been in touch with the CIA on and off since early 1961. He had become disenchanted, he said, with increasing Soviet interference in Cuban affairs. There were some inconsistencies in Cubela’s profile suggesting he might not be trustworthy, but the CIA nevertheless took him on as an “asset.” By mid-1962, he was—according to the CIA account—telling his case officer that he favored “
violent action … one master stroke” to overthrow Castro.

The orthodox thinking on the episode was for years that CIA officials—overstepping their authority—plotted Castro’s assassination behind the backs of the President and his brother. If the brothers encouraged other assassination plots against Castro, though—as compelling information now suggests—why doubt they were likewise aware of the Cubela plot?
5

There is something else. Many long accepted that Cubela may have been the traitor to Castro he appeared to be. A 2012 account of the episode by former senior CIA analyst Brian Latell, however, suggests persuasively that—as initially seemed possible—Cubela was a double agent all along. The “traitor,” according to this thesis, reported every approach by the CIA back to Castro.

The possible implications are obvious, an encouragement to those who theorize that Castro—becoming aware at some point that the United States hoped to have him killed—struck first and had a hand in President Kennedy’s assassination.

The totality of the evidence, though, is too tangled to justify that easy speculation.

With the exception of those privy to the continuing plans to overthrow Castro, Cuban exiles saw out the summer of 1963 filled with gloom and resentment. Passions ran highest among those the administration had discarded as extremists, whose operations were stymied by the Kennedy clampdown on unauthorized military activity.

A host of disparate exile groups had been trained and armed to the teeth, and admonitions from the White House only inflamed their determination to persist. One
Bay of Pigs veteran said long afterward, “We used the tactics we learned from the CIA because we were trained by them to do everything.”

The most militant groups, like Alpha 66—the group that incurred the President’s wrath with its attacks on Soviet shipping—had no intention of going out of business. More worryingly, some of the CIA’s protégés appear to have retained the loyalty and moral support of elements within the Agency itself. To such men, Kennedy’s new policies were to be opposed and thwarted.

Over the years, the author talked many times with the founder of Alpha 66, Antonio Veciana, a man whose revelations were to lead to intensive congressional investigation. They appeared to identify an element, either of the CIA or of one of the tentacles of U.S. intelligence, as having been behind exile outrages—a shadowy presence that deliberately sought to sabotage the President’s search for a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union.

When his group attacked Soviet ships in March 1963, Veciana claimed, it was on specific instructions from a man he knew as “Maurice Bishop”—the code name for his American intelligence handler. It was at Bishop’s urging that Veciana and his colleagues bragged about their exploits at a Washington press conference. It was he who continued to press them to flout Kennedy orders and mount fresh actions. “It was my case officer,” Veciana said, “who had the idea to attack the Soviet ships. The intention was to cause trouble between Kennedy and Russia. ‘Bishop’ believed that Kennedy and Khrushchev had made a secret agreement that the U.S.A. would do nothing more to help in the fight against Castro… . He said you had to put Kennedy against the wall in order to force him to make decisions that would remove
Castro’s regime.”

Veciana said he worked under the tutelage of “Maurice Bishop” from 1960, when the Cuban had been a leading accountant working in Havana, up to and beyond his flight from Cuba—for a total of nearly thirteen years. He had left Cuba following a botched assassination plot against Castro—the first but not the last that Bishop was to propose. His American patron also promoted armed landing operations and other skullduggery.

Ominously, Veciana asserted, Bishop told him in 1963 that “the best thing for this country was that Kennedy and his advisers should not be running it.” Just months after Bishop uttered those sentiments, according to Veciana, he saw him in the company of Lee Oswald.

It was late August or the first days of September, Veciana recalled, when Bishop summoned him to a meeting in Dallas, Texas—a city where they often had rendezvous. On arrival in Dallas, Veciana was told to meet Bishop at a skyscraper business building in the downtown area. From the details Veciana provided, this has been identified as having been the Southland Center, headquarters of a major insurance group. It had a public area on the first floor. When Veciana arrived, a little ahead of schedule, Bishop was not alone.

In Veciana’s words, “Maurice was accompanied by a young man who gave me the impression of being very quiet, rather strange and preoccupied. The three of us walked to a cafeteria. The young man was with us ten or fifteen minutes, until Maurice told him something like, ‘All right, see you later,’ and dismissed him.” After the assassination, when Lee Oswald’s face was plastered all over the newspapers and television screens, Veciana said, he at once recognized
Oswald as the young man he had seen with Bishop in Dallas.

Veciana remained adamant that there was no mistake. An Assassinations Committee staff report noted: “There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that the man was Oswald, not just someone who resembled him.” Veciana pointed out that he had been trained by Bishop and his associates to remember the physical characteristics of people. If it was not Oswald he saw with his handler, he said, it was his “exact double.”

Oswald may indeed have visited Dallas at the date Veciana mentioned. Though he was based at the time in New Orleans, the alleged Bishop meeting occurred during a period for which his movements are sparsely documented. Oswald was unusually invisible between August 21 and September 17, making only one New Orleans appearance that was reported by witnesses. This was on Labor Day, September 2, when he reportedly visited Charles Murret—the uncle with Mafia connections.