JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (53 page)

On November 1, 1995, the day after the ARRB’s letter was mailed from Washington, D.C., Richard Case Nagell was found dead in the bathroom of his Los Angeles house.

The autopsy’s conclusion was that he died from a heart attack.
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However, Nagell had told Russell in their last phone conversation the year before that he was in great health. The person to whom he was closest, his niece, confirmed that his health had improved considerably of late. He had no history of heart problems.
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Yet something had happened to impair Nagell’s health and equilibrium only a week and a half before his death. He had fallen badly and was hospitalized for a couple of days. Totally unlike himself, he phoned his niece to tell her about it, then began asking neighbors to check on him every day.

His niece said, “There were indications of his either losing confidence in his health and stability—or being suspicious of something. One or the other had to be the case.”
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Then he was found dead—of an apparent heart attack.

Russell asked an investigator for the Los Angeles coroner, Gary Kellerman, if a heart attack could be induced. Kellerman said it was indeed possible to kill in such a way, while leaving no clues:

“I’m not sure what chemical you have to use, but I’ve heard of it. From what I understand, it’s a chemical that gets into the system and then it’s gone. You can’t find it.”
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Nagell had entrusted his niece with the knowledge of a purple trunk in which he had stored “what everybody is trying to get ahold of,” as he put it—critical evidence, including his secretly recorded audiotape of his meeting with Oswald, Angel, and Arcacha. Robert Nagell, Richard’s son, discovered in his father’s house after his death the address of a Tucson, Arizona, storage unit. Robert drove immediately to the site, and retrieved the footlockers his father had stored there. They contained only family items. The purple trunk was missing. At the same time as Robert Nagell was racing to Tucson, his own house back in California was being broken into and ransacked.
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Even after his death, Richard Case Nagell’s turn toward the truth seemed to threaten the security of the covert action agencies he had once served.

To his friend and biographer Dick Russell, Nagell had once reflected in an offhand, despondent way on his failure to prevent the murder of John Kennedy:

“I don’t think much about it, to tell you the truth. Sometimes, though, I get thinking and I can’t go to sleep. Thinking what I could have done, the mistakes that could have been handled differently . . . I was in a quandary in September ’63. I didn’t know what to do . . . What did I accomplish? Not a goddamned thing.”
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As a CIA double agent working alongside Oswald, Nagell had been an active participant in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. By his dramatic resistance to that evil, even though it persisted without him, Richard Case Nagell did accomplish something. He showed personally, in the depths of murder and deceit, that one can still turn toward the truth. And by his noncooperation with evil, he may have accomplished one more thing. He may have set back the plot to assassinate the president just enough to give John F. Kennedy another two months in which to live.

In the last week of September 1963, Silvia Odio, a twenty-six-year-old Cuban immigrant living in Dallas, was visited at her apartment door in the early evening by three strange men. Silvia’s seventeen-year-old sister, Annie, who had come to babysit for Silvia’s children, answered the door and spoke with the men first. They asked to see the oldest sister in the Odio family. Annie went to find Silvia, who was preparing to go out for the evening. Both Annie and Silvia had enduring impressions of the men, but Annie spoke with them for only a minute or two. Silvia talked with them for about twenty minutes.

Two of the men looked Latin and spoke rapidly in Spanish. They acted as if they were Cuban exiles. The taller, more vocal man gave his “war name,” or Cuban underground alias, as “Leopoldo.” Silvia recalled the name of the shorter, stockier man with glasses as “Angelo” or “Angel.”
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The third man, their “gringo American” friend, said little. To Silvia he seemed unable to follow the Spanish. Yet the third man’s silent presence for a few minutes at her door would traumatize her future. He was introduced to her as “Leon Oswald.” She would later identify him in her Warren Commission testimony as the man charged in Dallas with the murder of President Kennedy.
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(She had no knowledge of Richard Case Nagell’s recent involvement with Oswald and two Cubans using the same war names of Leopoldo and Angelo or Angel.)

Leopoldo and Angel told Silvia they were members of JURE (Junta Revolucionaria Cubana), the anti-Castro group in which her parents were well known. The men claimed they were very good friends of her father, Amador Odio, then being held in a Cuban prison. They said they also knew JURE’s leader, Manolo Ray, with whom her father had worked closely. The strangers’ show of familiarity with her imprisoned father made Silvia uneasy.

Amador Odio and his wife, Sarah, had been active in struggles against Cuban dictators since the thirties.
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As the idealistic owner of Cuba’s largest trucking company, Amador Odio was an important early ally of Fidel Castro in the fight against the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Odio transported most of the arms and medical supplies to Castro’s rebel army in the Sierra Maestra mountains. After Castro’s triumph over Batista, Amador and Sarah began to see Fidel as a dictator himself. As Amador put it, they thought “Fidel betrayed the Revolution.”
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The Odios then took part in gun-running operations against the Cuban government. In October 1961 they were arrested for storing arms on their land and harboring a man who tried to assassinate Castro.
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They were imprisoned for eight years. The government confiscated their estate outside Havana, making it into a women’s prison. Sarah became an inmate in her former home. Amador was jailed on the Isle of Pines. Friends spirited their ten children out of the country. As the oldest at twenty-four, Silvia stepped into the shoes of her parents.
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By the fall of 1963, with her parents in jail in Cuba, two brothers in a Dallas orphanage, and the rest of the family scattered, Silvia Odio, divorced and with four children of her own, was struggling to keep both her family and her life together. The pressures sometimes overcame her. For a year she had fainting spells, passing out for hours at a time, and had seen a Dallas psychiatrist for help.
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Carrying on the tradition of her parents, she had also become a JURE activist. She was working with their friend, Manolo Ray, at raising funds for JURE. That made her not only an opponent of Castro but, in a more immediate context, an outsider in the Dallas exile community and a problem to the CIA. Most anti-Castro activists and their CIA sponsors regarded JURE, with its platform in support of economic justice and agrarian reform, as “Fidelism without Fidel.” For anti-Castro organizers, JURE’s democratic socialism had too much in common with the enemy.
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CIA organizers of the Bay of Pigs invasion even suspected that JURE founder, Manolo Ray, Castro’s recently resigned Minister of Public Works, was a Cuban agent—or at least a fellow traveler of Castro—in their midst. Bay of Pigs tactician Howard Hunt said, “Ray was the only [Cuban exile] leader concerning whose loyalties CIA remained unsure. The sequestration device [putting the exile leaders under house arrest at a CIA base during the invasion] was directed primarily at Ray, to ensure his not informing the enemy.”
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Ray was a critic of the CIA’s role in the invasion before it happened. The agency’s later top-secret internal report on the Bay of Pigs commented acidly that Ray “who never favored an invasion said after the defeat ‘I told you so’ to all available newspapers.”
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Perhaps Ray’s greatest liability in the eyes of the CIA was his favored-Cuban-activist status with John and Robert Kennedy. Ray’s leftist convictions, which alienated him from the exile community and the CIA, were what moved the Kennedys to overrule the agency and insist on Ray’s inclusion in the coalition of exile leaders. For as John Kennedy told French journalist Jean Daniel (to convey to Castro), the president agreed with the basic vision of the Cuban revolution
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—the same position held by Manolo Ray, the Odio family, and JURE.

The way Ray put it, in response to the charge of “Fidelism without Fidel,” was: “I don’t know what it means to be a leftist. If it means to be in favor of all the people and for the welfare of the masses, then I am.”
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Howard Hunt commented on this statement: “Fidel Castro could not have phrased it better.”
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As cited in a CIA dispatch in July 1963, Ray’s defensiveness among the exiles for his being a Kennedy ally only made matters worse. He told a presumably anti-Kennedy Cuban that he thought CIA agents “were more dangerous than the Kennedy administration.” He waded into still deeper water by adding, “The Kennedy administration would end but CIA agents always stayed, and their memory was longer than the memory of elephants and they never forgot or forgave.”
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Further CIA cables noted that in September and October 1963, Ray was “conferring with Attorney General Kennedy about the Cuban situation,”
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at exactly the same time as the CIA knew John and Robert Kennedy were exploring a possible rapprochement with Fidel Castro.

The CIA’s tensions with Manolo Ray (suspected Castroite and confirmed Kennedy ally) and JURE (“Fidelism without Fidel”) provided the backdrop to the visit to known JURE activist Silvia Odio by “JURE members” Leopoldo and Angel—and, most significantly, their friend Leon Oswald. The CIA saw Manolo Ray and JURE too closely related to a president who had become a national security risk. The encounter at Silvia Odio’s door would link the man portrayed as Kennedy’s assassin-to-be with a group the CIA wanted to contaminate.

As Leopoldo and Angel introduced themselves, speaking warmly of Amador Odio, Silvia listened suspiciously.

Leopoldo said, “We wanted you to meet this American. His name is Leon Oswald.” In the course of the conversation, he repeated Oswald’s name. He said Oswald was “very much interested in the Cuban cause.”
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Silvia would remember the American vividly. He himself told her his name was Leon Oswald. As she would later recall the scene at her door, Oswald was standing between the two Cubans just inside the vestibule, less than three feet away from her.
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While Leopoldo talked on quickly, Oswald just “kept smiling most of the time,” with the bright overhead lights shining down on his face. “He had a special grin,” she recalled, “a kind of funny smile.”
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Leopoldo said they had just come directly from New Orleans.
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The three men did appear “tired, unkempt and unshaven, as if they had just come from a long trip,” Silvia recalled.
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Leopoldo also said they were about to go on another trip. Silvia had the feeling she was being deliberately told about this unspecified trip.
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The probable date of the men’s visit at her door, September 25, was the eve of Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, when he or an imposter would implicate him with the Cuban and Soviet consulates. The three men’s “trip” fit that scenario.

Leopoldo said the purpose of their visiting Silvia was to ask her help in raising funds for JURE. Would she write for them some very nice letters in English as appeals to local businessmen? Silvia offered little comment, making no commitment.

As the strained conversation ended, Leopoldo gave her the impression he would contact her again. From her window Silvia watched the two Cubans and their American friend get in a car and drive away.

When Silvia got home from work a night or two later, she received a phone call from Leopoldo.

He asked her, “What do you think of the American?”

She said, “I don’t think anything.”

Leopoldo said, “You know, our idea is to introduce him to the underground in Cuba because he is great, he is kind of nuts. He told us we don’t have any guts, ‘you Cubans,’ because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba actually.”
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Silvia was getting upset with the conversation, but Leopoldo continued telling her what the American, “Leon Oswald,” supposedly said.

“And he said, ‘It is so easy to do it.’ He has told us.” Leopoldo swore in Spanish, emphasizing Oswald’s point about how easy it was to kill Kennedy. Leopoldo added that the American had been a Marine and was an expert shot. He was “kind of loco.”
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