Legacy of Secrecy (7 page)

the Secret Service, the FBI, and even Bobby’s own Justice Department

were excluded from domestic aspects of the planning, since member-

ship on the secret subcommittees was kept so small. Some meetings of

the Special Group included only three or four people. Even today, large

portions of their meeting notes from the summer and fall of 1963 are still

heavily censored, such as those from November 15, 1963. Other notes

from that time period that aren’t heavily censored, such as those from

the November 6, 1963, meeting, often say to “see special minutes for

additional items.” Those “special minutes” have never been released, a

sign of the secrecy that remains even after more than four decades.44

Chapter Two

By mid-November 1963, officials in Washington were putting the finish-

ing touches on the final draft of the “Plan for a Coup in Cuba.” While the

plans were being approved by JFK’s top military leaders, like Joint Chiefs

of Staff Chairman Maxwell Taylor and Defense Intelligence Agency

Chief General Joseph Carroll, much of the actual work was being done

by Army Secretary Cyrus Vance. Helping Vance with some of the plan-

ning was his assistant, Joseph Califano, and Califano’s aide, Lieutenant

Colonel Alexander Haig. According to Harry Williams, Vance was fully

aware of Almeida’s role. Califano and Haig have gone to great lengths

in their autobiographies and public comments to stress that Vance was

privy to more information about the Cuban operations than they were,

and have never acknowledged knowing about Almeida. However, Haig

and Califano acknowledge freely that they worked extensively on covert

Cuban operations in the summer and fall of 1963, and their names show

up in several “Plan for a Coup in Cuba” documents.

Their public comments help to describe the situation at the time.

On ABC’s
Nightline,
Haig said that Bobby Kennedy was running the

secret Cuban operations “hour by hour. I was part of it, as deputy to

Joe Califano and military assistant to . . . Cy Vance, the Secretary of the

Army, [who] was [presiding] over the State Department, the CIA, and

the National Security Council [when it came to Cuba]. I was intimately

involved.”

Califano’s autobiography wasn’t published until 2004, and in it he

says, “Presidential demands for a covert program to [eliminate] the

Soviet military presence in Cuba . . . intensified. Helping develop this

covert program and direct the Defense Department’s role in it occupied

much of my time in 1963.”1 Califano goes on to say, “I felt I was working

directly for the Attorney General and through him, for the President, and

with one exception I enthusiastically joined the administration’s effort to

topple Castro.” Califano says that exception was a suggestion to assas-

sinate Fidel, but he notes that at that meeting, “the CIA representatives

sat silent.” Califano later bemoans the fact that the Warren “Commission

was not informed of any of the efforts of . . . the CIA and Robert Kennedy

to eliminate Castro and stage a coup” in the fall of 1963.2

Those coup plans eventually grew to more than eighty pages by

November 1963, and those didn’t even include the US military’s detailed

invasion plans for Cuba. All of the quotes in the following brief sum-

mary are from the coup plans that Cyrus Vance sent to General Maxwell

Taylor. CIA and State had also contributed to, and signed off on, the

plans, which call for the leaders of the coup to “have some power base in

the Cuban army,” and to be in contact with the United States prior to the

coup. The US would also “seek the cooperation of selected Cuban exile

leaders.” The whole point of the coup would be to stage a seemingly

internal “palace coup in Cuba [that would] neutralize the top echelon of

Cuban leadership.” The term “neutralize” is simply a nice way of saying

“kill.” The plans stress that “from a political viewpoint, it is important . . .

the revolt appear genuine and not open to the charge of being a facade

for a forcible US overthrow of Castro [since] a well-planned and suc-

cessful ‘rescue’ of a revolt could be made politically acceptable” to US

allies and the Soviets.3

The coup plans say that after Castro’s death, President Kennedy

would “warn [the] Soviets not to intervene,” an important consideration

since “twelve to thirteen thousand Soviet military personnel of all kinds

remain [in Cuba].”4 The leaders of the coup “would have announced via

radio and other means the . . . establishment of a Provisional Govern-

ment. They would have appealed to the US for recognition and support,

particularly for air cover and a naval blockade, ostensibly to make cer-

tain that the Soviets do not intervene but actually, by prearrangement,

to immobilize the Cuban Air Force and Navy.”5

After “completion of such initial air attacks as may be necessary, pro-

vision will be made for the rapid, incremental introduction of balanced

forces, to include full-scale invasion if . . . necessary.” The plans also say

that “US military forces employed against Cuba should be accompa-

nied by US military–trained free Cubans.”6 Several hundred such Cuban

exiles had been trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Jackson, South

Carolina, and were ready to be deployed by mid-November 1963. If the

coup went well, it was hoped those Cuban exile US troops might be the

only US forces required.7

The United States wanted support from its allies, and the Kennedys’

ultimate goal was a free and democratic Cuba. The plans say, “The OAS

[Organization of American States] will send representatives to the island

24

LEGACY OF SECRECY

to assist the Provisional Government in preparing for and conduct of

free elections.”8

Among the Joint Chiefs, evidence indicates that only Maxwell Tay-

lor and DIA Chief Joseph Carroll were fully informed about Almeida.

Others, like Air Force Chief General Curtis LeMay, were too hawkish

and close to JFK’s conservative adversaries in Congress to be trusted

to know everything, especially about a plan that might be canceled if

there was a breakthrough with the secret peace feelers to Castro. As JFK

biographer Richard Reeves discovered, JFK was worried about the pos-

sibility of a military coup by a US general if he was perceived to have

suffered another disaster like the Bay of Pigs.9

Though military leaders like General Carroll had a greater role in the

coup than the CIA, some of the CIA’s activities caused him problems. A

CIA memo describes General Carroll’s frustration with the CIA regard-

ing the coup, a dissatisfaction that the General expressed to a Cuban

exile in a meeting held in a car in November 1963. Meeting about the

upcoming coup in a car, instead of at the Pentagon, was apparently for

security reasons, but that didn’t prevent General Carroll’s complaints

about the CIA from being reported to that very agency.10 Such domestic

spying was all too common in those days, and General Carroll was part

of that apparatus: His DIA was a newly created umbrella organization

that was supposed to coordinate the activities of services like Army

Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, which later Congressional inves-

tigations found had been involved in domestic surveillance for many

years.11 While the CIA had been tasked with getting more US assets into

Cuba prior to the coup, some of those assets were current or former US

military personnel who were also involved with the CIA. At least one of

them was under “tight surveillance” in November 1963, as he had been

since his return from the Soviet Union in 1962. As we first revealed in

2005, Naval Intelligence was maintaining phone, mail, and visual sur-

veillance on Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife. Since Naval Intelligence

lacked the resources to maintain such surveillance in many areas, they

relied on assistance from the FBI and the CIA. Our source, who main-

tained reports about Oswald and other domestic surveillance targets,

says that Oswald’s folder contained a CIA phone number to call if he

were ever involved in any problem.12

Today, the vast majority of Americans have no idea that in the days and

weeks before JFK’s trip to Dallas, Bobby Kennedy had a secret subcom-

mittee developing plans for what to do if a US official were assassinated.

The development of “Contingency Plans” for dealing with the possible

“assassination of American officials” grew out of planning for the coup,

and involved many of the same officials. This planning had begun in

September 1963, to deal with possible retaliation by Castro, if he learned

that JFK and Bobby were plotting to overthrow him. However, since

some of the officials working on these Contingency Plans didn’t know

about Almeida, they no doubt viewed the issue far differently, and with

far less urgency, than the few who did. Only three of the many files this

subcommittee generated have been declassified, though we also spoke

with two members of the Kennedy administration who were familiar

with the plans.13

One of the sources was an official who worked on the plans but had

not been told about Commander Almeida. The other source was a Ken-

nedy aide who saw the plans after they were drafted, but also knew

about Almeida and the imminent coup. While declassified plans show

that the subcommittee believed the “assassination of American officials”

to be “likely” in the fall of 1963, they considered assassination attempts

“unlikely in the US.”14 If Fidel found out about US plans and decided to

retaliate, they felt he would risk assassinating an American official only

outside the United States—for example, in a Latin American country.

Bobby and the officials working on the plans, especially those who

knew about Almeida, were considering how the United States should

react if, for example, the US ambassador to Panama was assassinated

and his murder appeared to be linked somehow to Cuba and the upcom-

ing coup. One of Vance’s memos about the coup stresses the importance

of having certain types of “information . . . to enable the President to

make” viable decisions so they could avoid any situation where the

President “would lack essential, evaluated information . . . but would

at the same time be under heavy pressure to respond quickly.”15

Bobby and the other officials didn’t want JFK to be under pressure

from the public, the press, or Congress to take hasty action against Cuba,

if early reports pointed toward Cuban involvement in the death of a US

official in Latin America. A hasty US military attack against Cuba could

provoke devastating retaliation from Russia. Also, imagine the disaster

if the United States started bombing Havana, only to have evidence

emerge proving the US official had been killed not by Fidel, but in a

routine robbery.

To avoid those problems, the Kennedy aide cautiously indicated

some of the conditions necessary for JFK to make an informed, rea-

soned response to the apparent assassination of a US official in Latin

26

LEGACY OF SECRECY

America: First, the US would need to control and limit initial publicity,

to keep the news media from generating an outcry for an immediate

military response against Cuba. To protect Almeida, any possible links

between the assassination and the coup plan would have to be hidden

from the press. US investigating agencies would need to take control of

the investigation from local authorities as soon as possible, including

gaining possession of important evidence. The autopsy would have to

be conducted at a secure US military facility, to ensure that information

couldn’t be leaked to the press. All of this would give JFK the time and

information needed to make an appropriate response.

In the third week of November 1963, the Cuba Contingency planning

was still going on, even though most of those working on it hadn’t been

told crucial information: that officials had uncovered plots to assassinate

JFK during his planned motorcades in Chicago on November 2 and in

Tampa on November 18. In hindsight, it’s hard to believe that most of

those working on plans to deal with the assassination of a US official

weren’t told of the Chicago and Tampa attempts to assassinate JFK, espe-

cially since each appeared to have possible links to Cuba. However, as

Chapter 5 documents, both attempts were kept out of the press because

of all the secrecy surrounding the upcoming coup. Apparently, JFK and

Bobby decided that sharing information about the attempts with the

entire subcommittee—and potentially their supervisors, aides, and

secretaries—could compromise the security of the entire coup plan.

In contrast to all the secret planning that JFK and Bobby hoped would

never be revealed, the Kennedy brothers were also concerned with

building positive publicity about the aftermath of the coup. If every-

thing went according to plan, it would appear as if JFK had responded