Legacy of Secrecy by Lamar Waldron Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Soviet takeover. According to Harry Williams and several declassified
    memos about the coup, Raul Castro would be eliminated along with
    Fidel. CIA memos show that Almeida was involved with Raul’s security,
    allowing him to ensure that Raul was taken care of at the same time
    Castro was killed.33
    While December 1, 1963, was the coup date given in the CIA Direc-
    tor’s memo (other CIA memos mention the same general time period),
    Harry Williams told us it was possible he might move the coup up by
    one day because he didn’t trust one of the other Cuban exile leaders,
    Manuel Artime. In October and November 1963, growing friction had
    developed between Harry Williams and Artime, because the latter had
    starting going to Bobby about various matters, behind Harry’s back.
    The extremely conservative Artime had agreed only reluctantly to work
    with more liberal exile leaders chosen by Harry and Bobby, and Artime
    would have preferred to become the sole leader of Cuba after Fidel’s
    assassination. Artime was often called the CIA’s “Golden Boy” because
    of all the money and attention lavished on him by the CIA and his best
    friend, CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, so Harry worried that Artime
    might try to get a jump on the other exile leaders. To prevent this
    possibility, Harry and Almeida could quietly move the coup date one
    day earlier, to Saturday, November 30, the day that Fidel would drive
    into Varadero. Once Harry was inside Cuba, meeting with Almeida, the
    final decision about the date for the coup and Fidel’s “elimination” would
    be theirs.
    According to two close associates of the Kennedy brothers, neither
    JFK nor Bobby considered the JFK-Almeida coup plan to be an assassina-
    tion plot. They explained that the Kennedys saw Castro’s “elimination”
    during a coup by Almeida as far different from the CIA’s earlier (and,
    unknown to the Kennedys, ongoing) plan to simply have Mafia assassins
    shoot Fidel. As noted in declassified files and confirmed by our sources,
    the President and the Attorney General viewed the JFK-Almeida coup
    plan as providing aid to “Cubans helping other Cubans”—supporting
    Cubans outside Cuba (Harry and selected exile leaders) so they could
    help Cubans inside Cuba (Almeida and his allies).34
    As described in the fourteen drafts of the “Plan for a Coup in
    Cuba”—most written in a flurry of activity after Almeida’s May 1963
    offer—extensive plans had been made for the coup, the US invasion, and
    the post-coup Cuban government. The Kennedys’ goals were to bring
    about eventual free elections, and to produce a Cuba free of the Mafia

Chapter One
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    influence that had been so pervasive during the Eisenhower-Nixon
    administration.
    Though these drafts involved State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, and
    the CIA, the Kennedys had devised a way for plans to be made without
    revealing Almeida’s identity to so many officials and aides that it became
    an open secret, like the Bay of Pigs. As files released in recent years docu-
    ment, and former officials confirm, most of the planning involving those
    agencies occurred under the guise of a “what if” scenario: What if a very
    high official could be found to stage a coup against Castro?35
    During the summer and fall of 1963, selected officials from those
    agencies knew about three ongoing attempts to find such an official. One
    was a plan code-named AMTRUNK by the CIA, though it was originally
    the brainchild of New York Times journalist Tad Szulc, a friend of JFK.
    The second was a joint CIA-DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) Task
    Force designed to find a high Cuban official willing to stage a coup. The
    third centered on a disgruntled midlevel Cuban official named Rolando
    Cubela, with whom the CIA had been in contact since late 1960. Cubela
    was brought to the CIA’s attention by a Trafficante associate, a busi-
    nessman the CIA code-named AMWHIP-1, who remained in contact
    with Cubela in 1963 and later.36