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

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1995 by Evan Thomas

FitzGerald had never told the director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, about Cubela. McCone was a wealthy Texas businessman who had been brought in to replace Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs. An outsider and a bit of a moralist, he had been kept ignorant of all the CIA's assassination plots. In the "need-to-know" world of the CIA, Richard Helms had decided that McCone did not need to know. Authority for the assassination plots was apparently something that could "spring forward" after a change of CIA directors--or even presidents. To Helms, the unrelenting pressure from Bobby Kennedy had sufficed as authorization. Besides, McCone did not want to know. When the subject of assassination was briefly raised (and quickly suppressed) at a meeting of the Special Group in August 1962, McCone, a good Catholic, had worried that if he got "involved in something like this" he might get excommunicated.

FitzGerald was sitting in front of the television with his wife on Sunday morning, November 24, when Jack Ruby stepped from a crowd and shot Oswald. FitzGerald began to cry, for the first and last time in his wife's experience. "Now we'll never know," he said.

FitzGerald never said anything more about it, and he kept his secrets even from the investigators of the Warren Commission, which was never informed about AMLASH or any of the CIA's Mafia plots. ("They didn't ask," said Richard Helms.) Still, it would be a mistake to make too much of the mystery. To be sure, Angleton never got over suspecting that the Russians or Cubans plotted to kill Kennedy. He thought the Russian defector Yuri Nosenko, who claimed that the Kremlin was innocent, was a KGB plant to throw the CIA off the trail. But most reputable students of the Kennedy assassination have concluded that Khrushchev and Castro did not kill Kennedy, if only because neither man wanted to start World War IlI.

Somewhat more plausible suspects are renegade Cuban exiles, conceivably abetted by rogue CIA agents. With his distrust and contempt for exiles, FitzGerald must have worried at least a little on this score. The FBI had been cracking down on extremist groups like Alpha 66 that wanted to overthrow Castro (the agency worried they would trip over their own plots). There had been considerable grumbling in the exile community in Miami that Kennedy had betrayed the Brigade at the Bay of Pigs. Had some hotheads tried to get even? Curiously, FitzGerald did not try very hard to investigate. "I was just told to watch the island," said Ted Shackley. "The mainland was the FBI's territory." The officers of JMWAVE, the CIA's anti-cuba operation, talked to some of their informants, but mostly they left the job to the FBI--which did very little, according to a report by a congressional committee set up in 1979 to re-investigate the Kennedy assassination.

FitzGerald had trouble giving up on Cubela. The CIA tried to put the Cuban major in touch with exile groups that might supply him with weapons on their own. Finally, in 1965, AMLASH was cut loose. The counterintelligence men at last convinced FitzGerald that Cubela was a poor security risk. Indeed, Castro was on to him: In March 1966, Cubela was arrested and tried for treason. Castro commuted his death sentence, possibly for cooperating with his secret police. For the CIA, a strange era was over.