$6,500 to kill a president: did Oswald sell his soul to Cuba?

The Times
January 07, 2006
$6,500 to kill a president: did Oswald sell his soul to Cuba?
By Anthony Summers

A German television documentary claims to have found a Castro link to the killing of KennedyTWO odd events this week, occurring thousands of miles apart, showed that — four decades on — the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a live issue. Four former Cuban intelligence agents, interviewed on German television, claimed that Kennedy’s assassin was allegedly a tool of Fidel Castro’s Security Department. In Washington, meanwhile, a senior attorney who served on the official American investigation — the Warren Commission — reversed his position on the same subject. William Coleman, a former assistant counsel, had told me before Christmas of a mission that he carried out on the orders of the US Chief Justice, Earl Warren. He had flown to a secret location for a meeting with Señor Castro — a rare event indeed for an American official, even more so given the nature of the discussion. What Mr Coleman learnt, he said, satisfied him — and the Chief Justice when he reported back — that "Castro’s regime had nothing to do with the President’s murder". Mr Coleman had spoken clearly, and in the presence of a third party. This week, however, I received a letter from him denying that the meeting with the Cuban leader had ever taken place. This is hard to explain, unless perhaps one notes that Mr Coleman — himself a former Cabinet member — is close to senior officials in the Bush Administration. Perhaps the Bush people, who take a hard line on Cuba, prefer that dark rumours about Señor Castro remain unrefuted. All the shots that killed Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the Warren commission concluded, were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former defector to the Soviet Union and a Castro sympathiser, acting alone. A second investigation years later, by a congressional committee, reported that there had "probably" been two snipers — one of them Oswald — and thus a conspiracy. As with the Warren commission, the committee said that it found no evidence to implicate Cuba. The German documentary, aired for the first time last night by Westdeutscher Rundfunk, claims to have found such evidence. Wilfried Huismann, an award-winning film-maker, presented a chilling scenario. On July 18, 1962, soon after Oswald’s return to America from the Soviet Union, Vladimir Kryuchkov, a future KGB chief, sent a telegram about Oswald to the head of Cuban intelligence, Comandante Ramiro Valdes. Though Oswald was "unstable", he said, the Cubans should take a look at him. Señor Valdes’ staff did as their Soviet counterparts suggested, and had their first contact with Oswald in November, a few weeks after the Cuban missile crisis. More contacts followed — directed, according to the documentary, by Rolando Cubela, then a trusted Castro associate. Oswald was supplied with modest sums of money, and acquired a file at Havana headquarters in a section assigned to "Foreign Collaborators". The pivotal encounter, the episode most incriminating to the Cubans, took place less than two months before the assassination. Fabián Escalante, a future chief of intelligence, and his nephew Aníbal, the son of a former president of the Cuban Communist Party, are named in the programme as having met Oswald. The young American said that he wanted to become a "soldier of the Revolution". To prove it he would kill Kennedy. He was supposedly twice observed in the Cuban Embassy’s garage — a location chosen because the Cubans knew the offices and corridors of their diplomatic mission were riddled with CIA bugs and hopelessly insecure — with another agent of State Security, a tall, thin, black man called César Morales Mesa. He allegedly paid Oswald the less than princely sum of $6,500. On November 22, 1963, after Kennedy was killed, the Cubans abandoned Oswald to his fate. He had been given certain assurances, presumably of a safe haven, but these were now forgotten. Oswald was arrested by Dallas police, but was shot dead by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner while being transferred to the county jail. Cuban State Security had initially cultivated Oswald, one former agent says, simply because he was "available . . . You take what you can get . . . We believed in the revolution and were determined to export it.". By late 1963, however, the agent continued, a "desire" developed in Havana to do away with the man perceived as "the counter-revolution personified", Kennedy. Oswald "volunteered". "Let’s just say, we used him," the agent said, "He adopted our plans as his own." In an interview with The Times, Huismann, 55, expressed "absolute" confidence that the story he has assembled reflects what really happened. He has worked on the case virtually non-stop since 2003, interviewing and scouring archives in the United States, Mexico and Cuba. Only one interviewee, Huismann said, was paid for his co-operation. This was "Nikolai", the serving Russian intelligence official who agreed to trawl KGB archives for previously withheld material on Oswald, and he received less than $1,000 (£560). Huismann is persuasive about Oscar Marino, the Cuban intelligence officer on whom he most relies. Another source is Antulio Ramírez, who in 1961 was the first person to hijack an aircraft to Cuba. That feat, he told Huismann, for a time won him the confidence of State Security agents, giving him opportunities to see documents, including a reference to the KGB’s 1962 message about Oswald. Even before the English-language version of the documentary is completed — the film has not yet been picked up by American or British broadcasters — sceptical voices are being raised. Though hundreds of researchers and scholars believe that Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy, most focus their suspicion not on Castro’s Cuba but on disaffected anti-Castro exiles and Mafia bosses targeted by Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. But the "Castro did it" theory was there from the start. "Dozens of allegations of a conspiratorial contact between Oswald and agents of the Cuban Government have been investigated," the Warren report noted. They included a charge that Oswald made a trip to Mexico City "to receive money and orders for the assassination" and the original claim that Oswald had been seen "receiving $6,500 to kill the President". That allegation first arose three days after the assassination. A young Nicaraguan named Gilberto Alvarado walked into the US Embassy in Mexico City and asked to see Thomas Mann, the ambassador. He then revealed how Oswald had been seen at the Cuban consulate in September. Señor Alvarado’s story was taken seriously for a while. The CIA had already told Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, of evidence that Oswald had visited Soviet and Cuban missions in Mexico — ostensibly to apply for travel visas. When Mr Mann began peppering Washington with messages about the supposed Cuban payment to Oswald, Johnson began talking of a possible nightmare scenario. The rumours circulating, he feared, could lead to nuclear war. According to the official record, the crisis evaporated when Señor Alvarado wavered in his story and a polygraph test showed that he might have been lying. Other information indicated that Johnson and his advisers determined, whatever the truth of the allegation, to squelch the story in the interests of world peace. Huismann said: "I do not doubt that Oswald met with Cuban agents to discuss the assassination of John F. Kennedy." To support the claim that the future State Security chief Señor Escalante was involved, Huismann presented a document provided by the late Marty Underwood, an aide who served both the murdered President and Johnson. "Early on the morning of November 22, 1963," a key extract reads, "a small Cuban airplane landed at the Mexico City airport. The single occupant transferred to another plane that was waiting at the far end of the airport. It immediately took off for Dallas, Texas. "Later that evening the plane returned from Dallas and the occupant transferred back to the Cuban airplane. After many months of checking we are confident that the occupant was Fabian Escalante." Señor Escalante, who appears in the German documentary, dismissed the Underwood document as a fake. He also said that the purported KGB message to Cuban intelligence, alerting them to Oswald’s potential usefulness, is "completely false, a forgery". He was not in Dallas on the day of the assassination, Señor Escalante asserted, nor — ever — in Mexico City. Others interviewed, one of them a Cuban diplomat, claim that he had served there and did meet Oswald. Huismann, though, believes that he knows the answer. The key, he says, is "the passionate rivalry that existed between the two protagonists. Not just between Castro and Kennedy but between their younger brothers, too. Raúl Castro was pressing for more aggressive action against the US ‘imperialist’ system, and Robert Kennedy wanted a showdown with Cuba." Señor Castro’s public stance over the years has always been to say that the President’s assassination was "una mala noticia" — bad news that he deeply regretted. His talk of retaliation against US leaders, he insisted, had been intended more as a warning than a threat. Some clues, meanwhile, suggest a truth that would leave Señor Castro neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent. While at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico, the Cuban leader reportedly twice told visitors, Oswald had indeed talked of shooting the President. In an impromptu conversation with a British reporter, Comer Clarke, the Cuban leader, is said to have made an astonishing admission: "Yes, I heard of Lee Harvey Oswald’s plan to kill President Kennedy. It’s possible I could have saved him. I might have been able to — but I didn’t. I never believed the plan would be put into effect." Anthony Summers is the author of The Kennedy Conspiracy?, which won the Golden Dagger award for best non-fiction on crime in 1980.

DEATH IN DALLAS
November 22, 1963 Kennedy killed by three shots in Dallas motorcade
November 24, 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of the killing, is shot dead in police station. His killer, Jack Ruby, said that he did it "for Jacqueline Kennedy"
September 28, 1964 A 300,000-word report by Chief Justice Earl Warren says that there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy, although security officials had been at fault
January 2, 1979 Congress Select Committee on Assassinations concludes that Oswald probably did not act alone, as more than three shots could be heard on a recording of the killing
March 2001 The Select Committee’s report is described as "seriously flawed" by the US National Academy of Sciences in a Science and Justice article

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1974173,00.html