Did U.S. leaders discuss murder of Fidel Castro?

Posted on Monday, 09.10.12

Did U.S. leaders discuss murder of Fidel Castro?
BY DAVID BARRETT
David.barrett@villanova.edu

It only took half a century, but we finally have direct evidence of U.S.
government leaders cryptically discussing ideas about assassinating
Fidel Castro just months before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Due to congressional investigations in the 1970s, we have long known of
(unsuccessful) Central Intelligence Agency plots to kill Castro in the
Eisenhower and Kennedy eras. And, based on what various CIA people later
testified, it has also been believed that, strangely, John McCone, who
headed the CIA for the last two years of the Kennedy presidency, did not
want to discuss or even hear about assassination plots.

Earlier this year, I came across a document at the National Archives
that seems to confirm this. But what I find most remarkable is that the
document even exists. We have never seen any sort of documentation from
the actual time of a high-level conversation about the taboo topic.

But there it was in State Department records from a late summer day in
1962: Secretary of State Dean Rusk had met at 11:30 a.m. with McCone,
Bobby Kennedy (who told the CIA he wanted to attend), Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara, and other advisers to JFK. The meeting was devoted to
Castro's Cuba, where intelligence showed the Russians pouring in men and
military equipment. McCone's notes of the meeting show participants
agreeing that strong measures against Castro's government were needed.
But what kind? The notes show that participants couldn't agree on that.

Only because Rusk's secretary at the State Department was listening and
taking notes when McCone called later that day, do we know much more
about what came up in the meeting. Her notes show an upset CIA leader:
"M[cCone] said the question came up this a.m. in connection with an
individual that should notcome up in m[eetin]gs. M[cCone] does not think
we should countenance talking or thinking about that."

A little context is needed to make sense of the telephone call.

• First, the "individual" who was the overwhelming focus of the meeting
was Castro.

• Second, those meetings in the office and presence of the secretary of
state were the policymaking elites of the Kennedy administration.

• Third, the Republican McCone was a tough Cold Warrior. That's why JFK
chose him as CIA head. McCone favored almost anything anyone proposed to
deal with Castro, except murder. McCone was said to have been against
anyone even raising the topic in his presence. "I could get
excommunicated!" the Catholic McCone said.

The notes made as the telephone conversation unfolded show just that
sort of abhorrence. In contrast, Secretary of State Rusk was less
agitated over the topic, saying "he would not worry about it," given the
reliable people at the meeting. But the CIA director brushed off that
assurance: He and Rusk could sit down and "talk privately," presumably
about the forbidden topic, but the "Sec[cretary] should take the posture
of not countenancing it." Without elaboration, the "Sec[retary] agreed."

The words "Castro" and "assassination" are not there in the telephone
conversation notes, but — given the morning meeting's agenda and
McCone's notes of it — it is very hard to believe that the "individual"
referred to in the subsequent phone call was anyone but Castro. The
notes seem to be concrete evidence supporting stories from across the
decades that McCone did not want others even to raise the idea in his
presence of killing Castro.

Of course, the Central Intelligence Agency did try to kill Castro during
the Kennedy era. How that could happen when the agency's leader didn't
want the subject discussed in his presence has been the subject of many
an author, but is still debated. I'm just amazed finally to see a
contemporaneous record actually showing the forbidden topic being raised
and then banished, at least for meetings with the CIA leader there.

And I'm struck by the irony: JFK, RFK, McCone, Rusk — they're all long
gone. Castro, the individual about whom those men obsessed, lives on.

David M. Barrett is a professor of political science at Villanova
University and co-author, with Max Holland, of "Blind Over Cuba: The
Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis," which is soon to be published.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/10/2990646/did-us-leaders-discuss-murder.html#comment-645595444