Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (33 page)

If Murgado’s story is to be believed, it has historical significance. Assassination researchers have long speculated about whether Bobby Kennedy was already familiar with the name Oswald when it suddenly exploded on the American stage on the afternoon of November 22. Was this the man to whom Bobby was referring when he told anti-Castro leader Harry Ruiz Williams that afternoon, “One of your guys did it”? Did RFK immediately associate Oswald with the covert war against Castro because of Murgado’s intelligence report? Or did he brush quickly past Oswald when Murgado brought him up because, as some researchers have suggested, he already connected the name to the administration’s secret war? The Murgado story may provide an important key to Bobby’s understanding of the crime. It could help explain why the president’s brother cast his suspicions immediately towards the anti-Castro underworld on the afternoon of November 22.

AS THE DAYS DWINDLED
down to November, the Kennedys struggled to control the sprawling operations related to Cuba. Some of these activities were sanctioned by the administration, some were not. Sometimes one arm of government subverted official government policy. Sometimes the Kennedys themselves seemed to contradict their own policy, ordering contingency plans for another Cuba invasion while opening a secret back channel to Castro to explore peace. And all the while, the CIA pursued its own agenda, with an unsavory cast of accomplices that included mobsters and the type of hotheaded exiles that gave Murgado nightmares. It was Bobby’s job to stay on top of this sulfurous miasma—a task that took on a frantic urgency as the threats against his brother multiplied. Murgado shook his head in wonder at the daunting burdens that seemed piled on Bobby’s shoulders. “He seemed to have twenty irons in the fire at any one time. I don’t know how a human being has the capability to fight on all those fronts at the same time. It was beyond my comprehension.”

In April 1963, two years after the Bay of Pigs, Cuban exiles’ seething frustration with the Kennedy administration burst into public view when José Miró Cardona, a distinguished Havana law professor who had briefly served as Castro’s first premier, angrily resigned as president of the Miami-based Cuban Revolutionary Council, the loose coalition that tied together anti-Castro rebel groups. Miró charged that the administration’s crackdown on Cuba raiding expeditions following the missile crisis proved that JFK had cut a deal with Khrushchev to “coexist” with Castro. The Kennedys had sold out the liberation movement, he dramatically declared: “The struggle for Cuba is in the process of being liquidated by the [U.S.] government.”

On April 5, days before issuing his heated denunciation of Kennedy policy, Miró had visited the attorney general in his office, where he found him surrounded by his rampant children and slobbering dog. The proud sixty-year-old jurist told RFK that his honor was at stake—he had stood with the Kennedys because the president had promised him the previous year that the United States would launch a military invasion of Cuba, but his brother had reneged on his pledge. In the history of Cuba, no man had ever been more “insulted” than he, Miró told Bobby. With his high forehead, oversized spectacles and graying mustache, Miró exuded a grave, professorial intensity. He spent four hours in the attorney general’s office, sternly presenting his case. But Kennedy was unmoved. He told Miró that the exile groups could not continue launching raids on Cuba “right under our nose and without any control.” To make matters worse, said the attorney general, the groups brayed loudly about their exploits at press conferences. As for a military invasion of the island, Bobby continued, Miro could forget it: “Doctor, we have told you from the very beginning that there is not going to be any invasion or military action.”

Two days later, an outraged Miró reported back to his CIA contact about his meeting with Kennedy. After leaving the Justice Department, the exile leader told the CIA official, he vented so bitterly to a Kennedy aide that he doubted “the president and attorney general would ever forgive what [I] said.” The administration tried to muzzle Miró before he could fire his anti-Kennedy blast in public. Before leaving Washington, the exile leader received a call from a White House aide who “threatened that [he] would be labeled a traitor,” according to a report by the CIA, which closely monitored the political storm. But Miró proudly retorted that “he could never be a traitor to the United States because he was not a citizen of the United States and that his first and only loyalty was to Cuba.”

Miró’s public break with the administration opened the floodgates of anti-Kennedy fury in the Cuban exile world. Desmond FitzGerald, the CIA official who had replaced Bill Harvey as the agency’s chief Cuba man, reported to Director McCone on April 11 that “there appears to be a movement within the Cuban Brigade to organize a formal request for the return of the Brigade flag, which was presented to President Kennedy at the Orange Bowl ceremony.” This would have been a stinging political embarrassment for the administration, coming at a time when Republican critics like Richard Nixon were chiding the White House for its flip-flopping Cuba policy. Under President Kennedy, sniped Nixon that month, we had “pledged the Cuban exiles that their flag would fly in Havana, then pledged ourselves not to invade.” The once and future Republican standard bearer announced that it was time “to do whatever is necessary to force the removal of the Soviet beachhead in Cuba.”

Bobby Kennedy maneuvered on multiple fronts to defuse the Cuban political bombshell. He worked feverishly to make sure that Brigade veterans, whom he called the “cream of Cuba,” were taken care of, pulling strings to find them jobs and legal help and even moving two exile leaders into his neighborhood, renting houses for them down the road from Hickory Hill. He smoothed the way for more than two hundred brigadistas to join the U.S. Army, where they underwent training at Fort Benning, Georgia for what they hoped would be a more successful assault on Cuba. He explored the possibility of creating a special Peace Corps unit for Cuban exiles and investigated how the government could channel others into law enforcement careers. Brigade family members thought of Bobby as their social worker. In June several exile wives wrote him to seek his help in getting their welfare payments continued.

JFK was cool and calculating in his handling of Cuba policy, greenlighting raids on the island when he wanted to send Moscow a warning signal and shutting them down when he wished to improve Soviet relations. He tended to regard Cuba as a sideshow, a pawn in the great superpower chess game. But Bobby took the Cuban exiles’ passionate cause more to heart, developing particularly strong sympathies for the Brigade veterans. Always attracted to men whose courage had been tested in battle, RFK embraced Brigade heroes like Artime, Oliva, and Williams. He appalled snobbish CIA officials like FitzGerald, who viewed the Cuban exiles with contempt, by entertaining them at his home and inviting them on family skiing trips. “Yes, I do think he felt a sense of guilt or obligation to them,” said John Nolan, Bobby’s point man on Cuba. “It was not just for political reasons, though he was clearly not ignorant of that. I think he felt indebted to them. He made himself available to the Brigade leaders any place, any time, day or night.”

While Bobby’s sympathies were genuine, he was constantly on alert for how the Brigade’s political disgruntlement could hurt his brother. In July, the attorney general’s office was informed of a disturbing development in Brigade circles. According to a confidential State Department memo sent to Kennedy’s office on July 19, 1963, two militant, far-right Bay of Pigs veterans identified only by their last names, “Llaca” and “Andreo,” were plotting a bold gambit to compel the Kennedy administration to intervene in Cuba. (These were likely Enrique Orbiz Llaca and Jose Santos Andreu.) The two men were attempting to “organize an exile raid with the objective of seizing a town in Cuba, preferably one with a weak security set-up but a strong radio station, and start broadcasting appeals for U.S. Marines to come to the rescue.” If the Kennedy administration did not respond by sending in military forces, the rebellion would be crushed, creating a political nightmare for the White House along the lines of Moscow’s bloody repression of the 1956 Hungary uprising. This, the memo pointed out, seemed to be the real goal of the plotters. After the freedom fighters were martyred by Castro’s forces, “Kennedy, having stood by doing nothing, would be open to the charge that he abandoned the rebels when he had a perfect pretext to act. Results: JFK would enter the lists in ’64 a branded coward and traitor to his word.”

The plot by Llaca and Andreu—who both boycotted the Orange Bowl ceremony in protest against JFK—was sinister enough on its own terms. But what made the scheme even more unsettling was the two exiles’ source of support. Llaca and Andreu were “backed by the same Bircher-type Republicans who figure in the Goldwater movement,” according to the State Department memo. These were the same well-heeled “movers and shakers,” the memo further illuminated, who were also underwriting the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba. This anti-Castro propaganda group was founded in 1962 by Paul Bethel, a former head of the U.S. Information Agency in Cuba who was close friends with David Atlee Phillips, the agency’s disinformation chief for the Guatemala coup and the Bay of Pigs. Other prominent members of the group included the Kennedys’ old bête noire, retired admiral Arleigh Burke; William Pawley, a right-wing Miami businessman deeply embedded in the intelligence world; CIA-linked Miami newspaper reporter Hal Hendrix; and the formidable Clare Boothe Luce—wife of Time-Life media baron Henry, journalist, playwright, former ambassador to Italy, and a woman who was also closely affiliated with the intelligence agency.

In other words, the Llaca-Andreu plot represented a perfect political storm for the Kennedys, a dangerous convergence of the brothers’ most avid enemies—coming together from the worlds of anti-Castro extremism, right-wing wealth, and U.S. intelligence to shake the White House. There is no record of how Robert Kennedy responded to this threat. Apparently the two exiles never succeeded in taking control of a Cuban town. But this was not the only brazen enterprise that summer aimed at humiliating the Kennedys. Nor was it the only plot involving Pawley and the Luces.

ON A BRIGHT JUNE
morning in 1963, the
Flying Tiger II
, a sixty-five-foot yacht owned by William Pawley, slipped away from its dock on fashionable Sunset Island in Miami’s Biscayne Bay and headed for the Florida Straits. It was the beginning of a high-stakes expedition that its planners hoped would damage the Kennedy presidency so badly that voters would decide to terminate it in 1964. On board the boat was a collection of venomously anti-Kennedy characters who would later attract the attention of the Warren Commission and other assassination investigators. Among them were John Martino, a former security expert in the Havana casinos run by Santo Trafficante who later hooked up with Johnny Rosselli to assemble anti-Castro hit teams; William “Rip” Robertson, a veteran of the CIA’s Guatemala and Bay of Pigs operations who had shifted his allegiance to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua; and Eduardo Pérez, better known as Eddie Bayo, a heroic Castro guerrilla who had turned against the revolution, joining the violent exile band, Alpha 66, one of the more defiantly anti-Kennedy groups.

It was Bayo and Martino who had kicked off the expedition when they began circulating a letter that had supposedly been smuggled out of the anti-Castro underground in Cuba. The letter claimed that two Soviet colonels stationed in Cuba knew where Russian nuclear weapons were hidden on the island in violation of the Kennedy-Khrushchev missile crisis settlement. The two Russians wanted to defect and win asylum in America. Right-wing circles in the United States had been buzzing with rumors of Soviet treachery ever since the superpower leaders negotiated an end to the nuclear crisis. Kennedy was certain to run for reelection the next year on his act of diplomatic glory that pulled the world back from the precipice. If JFK’s political enemies could produce shocking proof that he had been tricked by the Soviets, they were certain the American people would turn against his presidency.

As soon as Bayo and Martino began waving around the letter, the right-wing anti-Kennedy machinery churned into gear. After hearing the story, a conservative journalist named Nathaniel Weyl, who had testified against Alger Hiss in the early 1950s, phoned Jay Sourwine, chief counsel for the Senate Internal Security Committee. This was the notorious witch-hunting panel chaired by Senator James O. Eastland, the powerful Mississippi racist who had clashed swords with the Kennedys over Ole Miss. If the two Soviet defectors testified before Eastland’s committee, the administration would be forced to defend itself in a decidedly hostile forum. But Weyl’s friend, fellow conservative journalist Ralph de Toledano, had a better idea. After Toledano conferred with Barry Goldwater, it was decided that “the Russians would be immediately invited to Goldwater’s ranch in Arizona,” Weyl later recalled, “that [the senator] would call a press conference, enabling them to tell their story to the world, and that he would also give them enough money so they could start a new life in America.”

The publicity stunt would be a stunning one-two punch against the Kennedy presidency. The media spectacle would not only humiliate Kennedy before the eyes of America and the world, it would rocket-propel the campaign of the man who was determined to replace him.

To mount the expedition, the plotters turned to a wealthy businessman with a mysterious background, Bill Pawley. The sixty-seven-year-old Pawley had led the kind of colorful life that was the stuff of “old-time dime novels,”as his
New York Times
obituary later remarked, combining overseas financial exploits with cloak and dagger intrigue. After making a fortune in the Florida real-estate boom of the 1920s, Pawley developed airlines in Cuba and China and sold them to Pan American Airways. In China he helped organize the Flying Tigers, the legendary team of American pilots who fought against Japan before Pearl Harbor. After the war, he turned his attention to Latin America, buying Havana’s bus system and serving as ambassador to Peru and Brazil. This was his official resume, but unofficially Pawley was part of the CIA’s old boy network. A close friend of Allen Dulles, he used his diplomatic and business covers to carry out clandestine tasks on behalf of the agency, playing a key role in the Guatemala coup and talking President Eisenhower into approving the Bay of Pigs plan.