The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [317]
The CIA-Mafia plots were so much the stuff of pop novels and cinematic fantasies that they have largely crowded out awareness that the agency made many other kinds of serious attempts to kill Castro. The non-Mafia-associated assassination attempts in the early months of 1961 included those led by Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban exile and CIA operative, who wrote in his memoirs that his teams twice tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate Cuba by ship. John Henry Stephens, another official, testified to Congress that he had led five-man teams of “Poles, Germans, and Americans” in failed attempts against Castro. On March 29, 1961, a cable arrived at CIA headquarters from an operative code-named “NOTLOX”: “(Plan [for] 9 April): Fidel will talk at the Palace. Assassination attempt at said palace followed by a general shutting off of main electric in Havana.” Raphael Quintero, a prominent Cuban exile leader, recalled: “I was part of that [NOTLOX] plot. There was going to be a big boxing match and we knew Castro was supposed to be present. We planned to have him hit with a bazooka.” The CIA asked Quintero’s group to back off, apparently giving the go-ahead to another group of exiles who were unable to pull the assassination off a few days before the planned invasion of Cuba by an exile brigade.
The men who loved Kennedy and revere his memory most deeply are convinced that the president knew nothing about the assassination plans. They recall how repulsed the president appeared whenever such talk was even broached. Kennedy, however, was a man of many faces and possessed of knowledge far beyond that of any one of those who served him, and his denials, as passionate as they may have been, are by no means definitive. Deniability was the CIA’s god. There would be no paper trail, no bureaucratic witnesses, probably not even much detail, perhaps just a nodding suggestion so vague that the president could claim that he had not heard.
The deadly language of euphemism hung in the air. Sometimes words meant more than they seemed to mean. Other times they meant less. On still other occasions, they meant nothing at all. When some in the CIA talked of “disposing of Castro,” they meant ending the Communist regime. When others discussed “doing something about Castro,” they meant murdering him. In the end, these clandestine men spread a fog so thick that it was impossible to tell definitively who knew and who didn’t know about their acts, or even just when their murderous attempts began and when they ended.
When Bissell and his subordinates talked about murder, the 1967 CIA Inspector General’s Report on the assassination attempts noted that “the details were deliberately blurred and the specific intended result was never stated in unmistakable language.” There was, in the report’s telling phrase, “the pointed avoidance of ‘bad words.’” These were deadly serious men, but they did not want to be caught speaking such murderous words as “poison,” “shoot,” or “garrote.”
In February 1961, Bissell called into his office William Harvey, a top clandestine CIA officer, to discuss “executive action capability,” bureaucratic language for assassination. “The White House has twice urged me to create such a capability,” Harvey remembered the CIA covert director saying.
A decade and a half after these first assassination attempts had ended, Senator Charles Mathias was among those sorting through the charred remains of the policy.