Legacy of Secrecy by Lamar Waldron Read Free Book Online

Harry, and CIA
    Director McCone never imagined that this part of the secret operation
    would go on for decades.
    Bobby finished his final meetings with his key Cuban exile leaders in
    the week leading up to November 22, 1963. On that date, in the words
    of the Washington Post , Harry Williams was having “the most crucial of
    a series of secret meetings with top-level CIA and government people
    about . . . ‘the problem of Cuba’” at a safe house in Washington, D.C.27
    Unless an unforeseen problem arose at that meeting, Harry had been
    instructed by Bobby to proceed to Miami, and then to the US base at
    Guantanamo. From there, he would slip into Cuba for a final meeting
    with Almeida before the coup and “elimination” of Fidel. Once Harry
    was inside Castro’s Cuba, it would be difficult—perhaps impossible—to
    call off the coup. If all went according to plan, Harry would be inside
    hostile Cuban territory, beyond US protection and reliable communica-
    tion, by November 24 (Sunday) or November 25 (Monday). That would

Chapter One
17
    leave only a few days between the time Harry met with Almeida inside
    Cuba and the day Fidel was eliminated, Sunday, December 1, 1963.
    Setting the coup for December 1 was possible because almost every
    weekend Fidel traveled to—and from—his house at Varadero Beach in
    an open jeep. In those days, Fidel often rode in such a vehicle, instead of
    in a limousine, to evoke his triumphant jeep trip to Havana at the climax
    of the Revolution. As a Kennedy aide explained to us, and as numerous
    historians have confirmed, Fidel’s security precautions were legend-
    ary: He often varied his schedule, used doubles, and had meetings at
    odd late-night hours to foil any potential plotting. Such safety measures
    meant that Castro’s weekly jeep trip to Varadero was virtually the only
    reliable opportunity for an assassination attempt.
    In 1962, and again in the fall of 1963, the CIA had reviewed a plan in
    which Fidel would be killed at a restaurant he frequented. Diagrams
    were drawn to show how a shooter could hide in the pantry, since Fidel
    always went into the kitchen to talk to the cooks and busboys.28 But this
    plan was too risky and inflexible, compared with simply having snipers
    shoot Fidel in his open jeep as he traveled to or from Varadero Beach.
    A later AMWORLD document talks about assassinating Fidel “when
    he goes to Varadero,” and says one of Bobby’s Cuban exile aides was
    given “the details and the exact locations where Fidel spends every
    Saturday and Sunday, and specifically every Sunday at Varadero.”29
    Cuban exile Rafael “Chi Chi” Quintero, the assistant to one of Bobby’s
    exile leaders, Manuel Artime, later said “the plot finally agreed on was
    a combined assassination-coup attempt at Varadero, the beach resort on
    Cuba’s north coast, [where a CIA asset] was supposed to kill [Fidel] with
    a rifle.”30 Commander Almeida knew the local commander at Varadero,
    a man later said to have been one of the coup plotters. CIA propaganda
    expert David Atlee Phillips worked on AMWORLD and, years after his
    retirement, wrote a proposal for an autobiographical novel that lightly
    fictionalized his CIA work. In it, he said that Fidel would be shot “with
    a sniper’s rifle from an upper floor window of a building on the route
    where Castro often drove in an open jeep.”31
    A later declassified memo that mentions Almeida says the assassina-
    tion of Fidel “is to take place in public so that everyone can see that the
    leaders have been killed.”32 This was important, so that Fidel’s death
    couldn’t be hidden from the Cuban populace for days, weeks, or even
    months. Varadero is only seventy-five miles from Havana, so killing
    Fidel there in such a public way would ensure the news spread quickly.
    This would give Almeida and his associates a reason to immediately
    18
    LEGACY OF SECRECY
    arrest the patsy, and to invite in US forces to prevent a civil war and