Spinning the JFK assassination II

Last week I wrote a lengthy column critiquing Brian Latell’s Miami Herald article in which the author suggests possible involvement by the Cuban government in the Kennedy assassination. Because Latell’s piece raised more questions than I could discuss in a single article, I promised a second installment. Here it is.

One point that Latell stresses to discredit the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Harvey Oswald acting alone killed Kennedy is that the commissioners did not know about the CIA’s 1963 plot to use Rolando Cubela to kill Castro, which in turn allegedly gave Fidel a motive to kill JFK.

But Latell never addresses why the Warren Commission remained ignorant of the plot. The reason is simple. The CIA didn’t inform the commissioners of its abortive assassination attempt. Allen Dulles, former CIA director and a member of the Warren Commission, who Latell’ states “is known to have been aware of earlier plots against Castro,” didn’t breathe a word about them to the commission.

Why not? The most likely reason is that the CIA, like most who have looked seriously into the case, just did not believe that there was any connection between the CIA’s Cubela plot, the Castro government, and the Kennedy assassination. To this day there is no solid intelligence to support Latell’s thesis. With the Bay of Pigs, the CIA had blundered badly. Why embarrass itself again and discredit the United States internationally by revealing its involvement in yet another outrageously illegal and bungled plot when there was no compelling reason, such as solving Kennedy’s murder, to do so.

Moreover, since the time of the insurrection against Batista, political assassination was never a tactic favored by Castro, who sharply criticized the only serious assassination attempt on Batista, the March 13, 1957 attack on the presidential palace by students associated with a different faction in the anti-Batista struggle. The CIA had to know this.

I had to smile when Latell writes that Cubela and his handler were “urging something extremely dangerous” namely “to entangle both Kennedy brothers in a murder conspiracy targeting Castro.” In any case, the alleged Cuban double agent would not be entangling the Kennedys. He would be merely exposing them. They entangled themselves.

And where in all this lay the danger? What was Castro going to do, attack the United States? Organize a proxy army of American militant minority organizations and radical whites to invade? Ridiculous.

What would have been extremely dangerous, foolhardy and illogical would be for the Castro government to organize a plot to kill the president of a country with the military might to eradicate Cuba from the face of the earth. U.S. intelligence would likely uncover the plot, with horrific consequences for the Cuban people and, especially, for the revolution and its leaders.

Castro pushed the envelope many times when it came to the United States but he was always keenly aware of where the red lines were. That’s why he never laid a finger on the U.S. Naval base on Cuban territory in Guantanamo even though the area was seized by the United States from Cuba illegitimately and under extreme duress. Would Castro try to kill a sitting U.S. president, a transgression far greater than retaking Guantanamo, a real crime subject to widespread international condemnation and extremely severe military retaliation, with the broad support of the American people, by the United States? Ludicrous.

The latter part of the article reminds me of the first encounter I had with Brian Latell at a banquet in Washington where he was the invited speaker. It was around the time the Bush administration was using the specter of weapons of mass destruction to sell the war in Iraq. A much less well-known parallel effort was being made by the likes of John Bolton and Brian Latell to push a more bellicose policy toward Cuba than even Bush was willing to enact. Their argument was that Cuba was a threat to the United States because it had chemical and/or biological weapons, in effect, WMD.

As in this article, in which Latell writes that “it is now high time for the Cuban regime to come clean” on the Kennedy assassination, in his DC talk Latell said in effect that it is high time for Cuba to be forced to open its arsenal of weapons for U.S. inspection. I raised my hand and said I agreed with Latell so long as the United States would be willing to open its arsenal to Cuban inspection. That was the end of the conversation.

Cold War ideologues like Latell, who won’t even fade away, can sell this sort of stuff for the same reason conspiracy nuts can. The American people will not believe a deluded loser like Oswald could slay the King of Camelot. That doesn’t make any sense. And the world must make sense just as Hollywood movies must have happy endings. In this climate of denial, it’s easy to float almost any theory, however unsubstantiated. In Miami, to pass off a theory that blames Castro for the Kennedy assassination is child’s play.

The tiger has changed his address but not his stripes.