"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (27 page)

“We'll have to check, make sure it's dependable. If we do go with this, how do you suggest we get the stuff down there?”

“It'll be tough. Castro has appointed a truly brilliant guy, Fabian Escalante, as his new head of security.”

“How about this?” someone suggested. “Suppose we stage an air-jacking. The pilot must appear to be an average guy. With him would be a recruit, not officially CIA, so no record with us Escalante might come across. Some obscure man who'd like to do his government a big favor, wants the money, and hungers for some adventure in his life. You know, fame and fortune?”

“Great. Only, where do we find such a man?”

“I know precisely the right guy,” Frank Sturgis piped in.

*

Knowing time was of the essence, Edwards reached a decision that day. LSD had to be abandoned owing to its unpredictable impact: Castro might experience a heightened clarity rather than disorganization. The notion of an air-jack remained very much alive, that device in use already as a means of delivering CIA operatives down to Cuba. Shef liked the concept of transforming Castro into a clown in the eyes of his people and had discussed this with Jake Esterline, head of the Cuba task force.

The whole business came down to finding two individuals who were willing to try just about anything and able to pull off the near-impossible. Sturgis had already suggested Lee Oswald as the likeliest candidate for that element of the job. What they needed now was someone willing to fly the plane down.

Needed too was a top gun, someone with prowess at shooting his way out of any impossible situations if it came down to that. Owing to the reconfigured relationships between the CIA and the Mafia, this meant bringing one of their boys on board.

“I think I've got it,” Edwards announced. “Since Bob Maheu has already begun the process of establishing a Mob connection, in my mind the third man ought to be one of theirs. A mobster known for his derring-do. Preferably one who already has a Cuban-connection, knows the lay of the land, so to speak.”

“Alright,” Esterline countered, “so who comes to mind?”

“Maheu says that one of their top boys in Vegas, Johnny Handsome, fits the bill. The man Giancana dispatched to kill Castro unless he re-opened the casinos back in January '59.”

Esterline considered the possibilities. “Won't that make him immediately recognizable if captured?”

“Castro only saw him for a few seconds. With a thick beard, a change of hair-color, and contact lenses to alter his eyes? I think Johnny can get away with it.”

Maheu was at once contacted as to whether this approach might serve as an intermediary attempt to come up with a solution to the Castro problem. Meanwhile, the conversation pertaining to the Mob whacking the Cuban dictator via some pretty girl continued. For the better part of a month, Frank Sturgis had begun processing just the person to take on the role of Castro's assassin. Occasionally, the girl was called ‘Lolita' referring to her
child-like appearance. On others, The Kraut, referencing her ethnicity.

Maheu called Rosselli, Rosselli called Giancana, and Old Sam said sure, why don't they try that approach during the brief time remaining before the all-important Miami meeting in which a more permanent solution would be discussed. Rosselli got back to Maheu, Maheu called Edwards, and he contacted Allen Dulles.

They agreed to try this route, doing so without informing Kennedy. They were fearful that JFK was out for blood and might say ‘no: I want you to whack the Beard and that's that.'

When Lee first heard the plans from George, he all but did a dance of joy. Johnny Rosseli had mightily impressed him during the twinning process. The idea of heading off on such a top secret mission with the greatest CIA operative and the deadliest of the Made Men thrilled Lee to the bone. It was like ... being the star of a spy movie.

A CIA private jet flew Lee and George to Tampa. There, Santos Trafficante Jr. had several
soldati
pick the boys up at the airport in a sleek limo. At Crisco's, a Mob owned and operated restaurant in downtown, the two CIA operatives met in a quiet corner with Johnny, his code name now ‘Jimmy Stewart,' after the all-American movie star, an irony Rosselli enjoyed.

*

“My beard,” Fidel Castro had swaggeringly stated in a TV interview, “means many things to my people.”

Though he did not choose to offer specifics, most listeners in Cuba grasped what he meant. Shaggy, unkempt and possibly dirty, perhaps with a horde of microscopic bugs nestled deep within the twisted strands, Castro's facial hair represented, at least in the late 1950s, an open rebellion against all those white-bread values America held most dear during the Eisenhower era.

Here was a rebel, maverick, non-conformist. The Third World equivalent of one of those Beatniks in Greenwich Village, who inhabited cellars instead of apartments. Or in some cases lofts; anything that did not fit into the mainstream style of living. These were self-consciously squalid drop-outs from society who had, like Castro down south, grown disenchanted with the U.S. postwar policy toward Third World nations. Every upstanding suburbanite considered these characters a threat to everything they held dear. As most of the males wore beards, that caused them to be suspect as Communists, perhaps pro-Castro.

What better, then, to turn Castro into a figure of ridicule by eliminating this signature item? A beardless Fidel would look naked in a manner of speaking. And, as such, humorous. No one can take seriously a giant who, like Samson, existed without hair in Gaza or Havana. People could not respect or fear what they found funny. Here was a curious means of dethroning the target.

So began a brief-lived crusade to de-beard the Beard. The trio of Lee, Maheu and Johnny was not the first to depart. Even as they were readying to board their aircraft, another ascended to begin the hour-and-a-half journey south. Hidden aboard, to be passed to an operative there who would then turn the cargo over to the musketeers, was a box of cigars laced with thallium salts. These, the CIA's scientists insisted, would do the job.

The perpetrator would land his supposedly high-jacked plane, send the pretend-kidnap-victim-pilot flying back home, then surrender himself to authorities as a defector. This would put him in the position to pass the cigars on to another CIA agent already planted in Castro's organization. This man would sneak the box to Lee Oswald after his arrival.

Always, the Company worked in a serpentine method. The CIA doctrine held that the more complex any such operation became, the less likely any specific member of their task force would be apprehended. If they were confused, the enemy must be, too.

Initially, the plan appeared to be working. No one however had taken Castro's considerable sophistication as to tobacco into account. Oswald, employed in the radio station, offered his new leader a cigar. The moment Fidel locked his teeth onto the strange smelling tube, he sensed something wrong. Castro spit out the initial whiff of smoke to enter his throat, shouting for guards to drag the CIA plant off to El Principe. Lee, Maheu and Johnny spent several miserable nights there before release.

The plot didn't end there. The operative who had flown in previous to Lee had accepted a lowly job at the Havana Hilton. Despite Castro's supposed nonchalant attitude toward fashion, it was well known that Fidel always left his shoes outside of his suite door every night to be shined, this (and the fine silk underwear he secretively slipped into every morn before pulling his ragged fatigues on over them) one of his few decadences. The agent requested the honor of doing the shining. In the process, he would scatter thallium salts in the shoes.

The plan held that such toxic chemicals would be absorbed through Castro's socks, into his skin. The salts weren't strong enough to kill, but the specialists insisted that his beard would shortly fall out, and that would be the end of that.

This was not to be the case. The following morning, Fidel took one look at his shoes, saw white powder spread all across their insides, and yelped for the employee responsible to be arrested. El Principle now held another lodger. From then on, supposed defectors from the U.S. were no longer greeted with a hero's welcome. Instead, all would be closely scrutinized.

Here ended the last great hope of ridding the world of Fidel Castro without killing him outright. From then on, it was do or die, the hope being that Castro would do the dying.

Several days later, Santo Trafficante, aka Joe the Courier, passed the botulin pills to Frank Angelo Fiorini, aka Frank Anthony Sturgis, aka George, the CIA operative. He in turn handed them over to Lorita Morenz, aka The Kraut, aka Lolita.

She failed so totally in her attempt to kill Castro that Sam Giancante, aka Sam Gold, sent word through Rosselli, aka Johnny Roselli, aka Handsome, aka John F. Stewart, to Maheu, aka Dick Tracy. He passed Sam's message to Edwards, who passed it on to Jake Esterline. He then turned it over to Dick Bissell, who whispered with Allen Dulles, who huddled with John Foster Dulles.

He in turn reported to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. La Casa Nostra, working with CIA operative George, had to take some time if they were to plan a more effective assassination for Castro. The word went back through the grapevine that George had another solution to the problem in mind. No longer would he rely on giddy girls who thought they'd mastered the skills of a female agent in a James Bond book. This must be accomplished by some man, a nondescript face in the crowd. Already, George had picked out the precise person he wanted for the job.

*

JFK, unable to grasp why the task couldn't be completed as fast and clean as it would have been in one of those Ian Fleming novels he daily devoured, howled that heads would roll if this was not accomplished. Shortly, Chief of TSD Cornelius Roosevelt okayed yet another box of cigars, this one containing fifty Havanas laced with the deadly botulin toxin. These were passed on, once the lab had completed their latest offering, to Dr. Edward Gunn, Chief of the CIA's Operations Division.

Why cigars would work this time around, at least in the minds of those who conceived the plan, was anyone's guess. Apparently none had ever heard the old adage that the dumbest of the dumb were those who steadfastly continued to try and attain a goal by the same means that had failed in the past.

Lee Oswald could have told them that. But they didn't ask.

On February 13, 1961, Gunn passed the cigars to an unknown CIA operative assigned to deliver the box to some unspecified Mafia runner, who would then give them to the courier assigned to smuggle the cigars into Havana, these to be handed over to the CIA's operative, already smuggled into Cuba by submarine.

Whether they arrived but were never employed, or failed to make it there, remains unknown. Two months later, though, the CIA and the Mob received word that any such attempts on Castro's life must cease, at least for the time being. This edict came down from the highest level of the U.S. government.

The reason? Between April 15 and 18, 1961, the Bay of Pigs disaster transpired. In its aftermath, America appeared shamed in the eyes of the international community. The last thing that anyone wanted now was for Castro to die as a result of what would obviously be an American instigated assassination.

For the time being then Fidel would have to be tolerated.

At least until the world began the process of hopefully forgetting about the fiasco that was the Bay of Pigs.

“If the press had been doing their job, the

Bay of Pigs would have never happened.”

—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1962

 

Shortly after midnight on April 15, 1961, a long black limo, six CIA agents seated inside, slowly pulled up to a nearly deserted airstrip in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Dressed in all but identical dark suits, each man wore a thin black tie and sunglasses despite the late hour. Such cryptic attire caused the agents to appear less what they were than stereotypes from some Hollywood movie. Each cradled a submachine gun under one arm. Reaching an empty parking lot, they exited their vehicle and marched up toward the hangers, the buildings' curved roofs appearing silver in the stark moonlight.

Awaiting them, having patiently remained silent in one of the hangers for an hour, 17 Cubans stood at the ready. For the past six months, they had been living in Miami, training and planning for this moment. Now, the Cubans impatiently held their collective breath, anticipating such members from The Outfit, aka The Company, aka the CIA. Compared with these tall, slick Americans, the Cubans appeared bedraggled, wearing rough khaki pants and worn leather flight jackets. All of those gathered together here had only one thing in common: they wore cowboy boots, natural enough for the scruffy Cubans perhaps, less so for the suited CIA agents. Nonetheless, such foot-ware served as a special sign among these uneasy allies. When these men did on occasion speak of it, they used a phrase that had naturally developed among those united in the international fight against the spread of communism: Cowboy Politics.

Initially, though, no one spoke. The Cubans eagerly nodded to the Americans who returned that gesture, if in a more restrained manner. In the cool of the night, the two groups stood, wordlessly facing one another under what appeared a huge vanilla wafer pinned to a black satin backdrop up above. Some intruder on the scene, failing to grasp what was about to take place, might have mistakenly thought that at any moment the Cubans would reach under their jackets and pull out pistols, the CIA boys responding in kind. Then the two groups would fire at one another in the manner of an Old West shootout, America's wild frontier days re-staged in the 20th century. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral, circa 1961. But that was not to be the case.

For one thing, the Cubans didn't carry guns. Also, these men had gathered to confer, not fight. At least not yet. And certainly not with each other.