Bobby Kennedy's war on Castro - CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1995 by Evan Thomas

But FitzGerald could not escape Kennedy's incessant demands. While at FitzGerald's country house, FitzGerald's nephew Albert Francke recalled overhearing his uncle say, firmly and loudly into the telephone one Sunday afternoon in 1963, "No, Bobby, we can't do that."

FitzGerald's daughter Joan Denny remembered her father entering into a towering rage upon learning that Bobby had been meeting privately with Cuban exiles. RFK was entertaining Cuban exiles at his house, Hickory Hill, and calling them at their apartments at the Ebbitt Hotel in downtown Washington, where they were housed by the CIA. FitzGerald was very wary of the Cuban exiles. "I have dealt with a very rich assortment of exiles in the past," he wrote his daughter Frances in June 1963, "but none can compare with the Cuban group for genuine stupidity and militant childishness. At times I feel sorry for Castro--a sculptor in silly putty." Having the attorney general freelance with the Cuban exile community was, FitzGerald felt, an invitation to disaster.

The exiles were even granted an audience with the President, who promised to avenge the Bay of Pigs. FitzGerald may have noted with apprehension that one of the exiles escorted into the Oval Office, Tony Varona, had been hired earlier by the CIA's mob contact, Johnny Rosselli, to make an attempt to kill Castro. To bring an assassin into the Oval Office was hardly the way to preserve plausible deniability.

Enter AMLASH

In the many attempts to get rid of Fidel Castro, the CIA had always been confounded by the lack of a good delivery system--an assassin who was at once close to Castro and willing to kill him. In the fall of 1963, FitzGerald's attention turned to a Cuban major, Rolando Cubela Secades, code name AMLASH.

First recruited as an agent by the CIA in 1961, Cubela had access to Castro and, equally important, experience as an assassin. In 1959, as a student revolutionary, he had shot and killed Batista's chief of military intelligence. Cubela had grown disenchanted with Castro and wanted to lead a coup against him. He was willing to kill Castro, though the word "assassinate" offended him; he preferred "eliminate." In October 1963, he told his CIA handlers that he wanted a show of support from the United States government. Cubela asked to meet personally with Robert F. Kennedy.

This demand was impossible, but FitzGerald agreed to meet with Cubela as RFK's "personal representative." FitzGerald sent word to AMLASH that he would see him at a CIA safe house in Paris on October 29. He came to regret this decision.

For a senior CIA official with close ties to the White House to meet with a foreign asset to discuss an assassination plot was highly unorthodox, even in that freewheeling era. It broke the rules of trade craft, which seek to build in deniability and secrecy through the use of cut-outs--go-betweens who are kept in the dark about the identities of their true masters--and by restricting access to information to those who need to know. FitzGerald was a careful professional, but in this case his activist instinct, abetted by RFK's prodding, got the better of his judgment.