A conspiracy theory with a political agenda

MIAMI – Brian Lattel’s November 20 Miami Herald opinion column (“JFK assassination: What did Castro know?“) about Castro’s foreknowledge that the CIA was trying to kill him as a possible motive for Cuban involvement in the Kennedy crime is wrong on so many levels I scarcely know where to begin.

Now, there are myriad conspiracy theories about the murder of Kennedy, most of them cooked up by cranks, kooks, and charlatans. Lattel’s is not one of those. His is a conspiracy theory with a political agenda, the same one the author unsuccessfully pursued for most of his professional career: getting Fidel Castro.

Lattel’s very first sentence is revealing: “Fidel Castro knew that the CIA was trying to kill him.” He should know. Lattel, now a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies (ICCAS), had a long career in the CIA.

Lattel’s opening salvo establishes only one thing for sure, that the United States was trying to assassinate the head of state of another sovereign nation. That’s as clear a violation of international law as it gets, one that makes a mockery of the values and ideals this country claims to represent.

Yet Latell doesn’t even mention the moral and legal implications of the planned murder. His tone is matter of fact. It is as if assassination of world leaders was business as usual for the CIA. And, in fact, at that time the CIA made several attempts on the lives of inconvenient heads of state, some of them successful, a fact later amply documented by the findings of congressional and other investigations. At the time, however, the American people did not have a clue that a virtual state-sponsored Murder Inc. was operating, supposedly on their behalf.

In line with the sole intent of the column – to cast suspicion on Castro through innuendo – Lattel shows no interest in these weighty issues. Instead his focus is on what Castro knew about U.S. plans to kill him and what he did about it. After all, if Castro knew Kennedy was trying to kill him, he had a powerful motive to get Kennedy first. Ergo, Castro should be a prime suspect in the Kennedy assassination.

Lattel, in other words, tries to implicate the target of a real state-sponsored assassination in a crime which numerous serious inquiries have concluded was not the product of any conspiracy at all.

Lattel’s departure from facts and logic hardly ends there. According to Latell, Castro knew of CIA plans to kill him because the CIA had unwittingly recruited a Castro double agent to carry out the assassination. According to Lattel, Rolando Cubela, a top Cuban official was eager to undertake the killing, and for the CIA to provide him with a suitable weapon. Then, Lattel contradicts himself, describing Cubela as ready to withdraw from the mission unless Robert Kennedy reassured him personally that the U.S. stood behind him. Latell concludes from this that Castro wanted to implicate the highest levels of the U.S. government in the conspiracy. More likely, Cubela realized he was being sent on a suicide mission and rather than lose face demanded conditions he knew were very unlikely to be met given that operations of this kind are carried out under the doctrine of “plausible deniability.”

Eventually, a high CIA official, who was a friend of Bobby Kennedy, went to Paris where the plot was being hatched and convinced Cubela he could count on the U.S. Nestor Sanchez, Cubelas’ CIA case officer, who Lattel describes as having a “stellar career in covert operations,” gave Cubela what Lattel himself describes as “a preposterous murder weapon: a pen fitted with a syringe that could be filled with poison and used to inoculate Castro” [sic, inoculations are used to prevent illness, the proper word here is poison]. Now how is it possible that this CIA officer with a stellar career in covert operations would supply the would-be assassin with such a Rube Goldberg* contraption?

Regarding Cubela being a double agent, perhaps he was. But, as usual Lattel provides not a hint of evidence to that effect. Consider that in 1963, Fidel Castro, a big man, was in his middle thirties and strong. At that time, he often carried a sidearm. And his bodyguards were never far away. In the event that Castro would have granted Cubela an audience – by no means a sure thing – how could he have succeeded in killing Castro under such conditions and wielding a preposterous weapon?

The more likely scenario is that Cubela would have failed to kill Castro and get himself killed on the spot or subsequently by firing squad. What was the CIA thinking? And what did Cubela have to gain? It’s quite possible that once in Havana Cubela realized what a harebrained scheme he had gotten himself into and that his only chance to survive it was to confess all and perhaps even try to sell the idea that he was trying to play the Americans all along.

The behavior of the Cuban government in the Cubela case also fails to square with the idea of Cubela as double agent. By publicly presenting Cubela’s credible first-hand account of the U.S. assassination plot against Castro, the Cuban government would have scored huge political and propaganda points at home and embarrassed the United States at home and abroad. Yet the Cuban government did not capitalize on what would have been a huge political and propaganda coup if Cubela indeed had been a double agent. Why did it not? Latell is conveniently silent on this as on many other questions.

There is so much disinformation in this short piece and so many questions about how the Miami Herald has become virtually the official publishing house for ICCAS, including two pieces within a week insinuating Cuban involvement in the JFK assassination, that it is worth a sequel next week.

For now, this: Latell’s central contention that the “possible involvement of the Cuban government in the president’s death has never been adequately investigated,” is just a boldfaced lie. Since the Warren Commission there have been innumerable in-depth government, academic and journalistic investigations examining every conspiracy theory, including the possibility of Cuban involvement. After five decades not a shred of evidence has been brought to light inculpating Castro, the CIA, the Mafia, Cuban exiles, right-wing business interests, or any other of the usual suspects.

For instance, in 1994, in the wake of filmmaker Oliver Stone’s ludicrous attempt at historical revisionism in “JFK,” the Assassination Records Review Board undertook its own investigation of the Kennedy killing. The board, which uncovered tens of thousands of relevant records that had never been released, is arguably the most authoritative voice in the conspiracy debate.

Contacted by NBC recently, the Board chairman, John R. Tunheim, now a federal judge, was unequivocal in his conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald did it – and no one else. “I look back to the hard evidence of the case, the real evidence, the evidence admissible in court, and all of that points to Oswald acting alone.”

* Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complex gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.