Bobby Kennedy's war on Castro.

After World War II, when the United States was its superpower role, foreign policy was made quite informally. There was no national security staff--policy was made by Defense Secretary James Forrestal and White House advisor Clark Clifford over lunch at the F Street Club, and approved by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Arthur Vandenburg, who would receive. Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett for martinis and classified cables in his apartment at the old Wardman Park Hotel every afternoon at five.

These men did get a lot done, and much of it was good: the Marshall Plan, the Western Alliance, the Berlin Air Lift. But with freedom sometimes came excess--particularly in the world of spies. The freewheeling Central Intelligence Agency bribed officials and overthrew foreign governments without much debate by its executive branch masters, who hid behind the convenient doctrine of "plausible deniability." For them, covert action was appealing because it was cheap and, generally speaking, did not risk World War III.

But covert action and ad hoc foreign policy didn't always work as intended. This was especially true of the clumsy attempts by the CIA to get rid of Fidel Castro during the early years of the Cuban dictator's regime, from 1960 to 1964. The CIA's blunders against Castro would have been funny if they hadn't been so dangerous. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 and the many assassination attempts--the CIA even hired the Mafia to make a failed attempt--helped persuade Castro to accept nuclear-tipped missiles on the island in 1962, leading the world to the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The last of the CIA's plots to kill Castro is a truly weird tale. Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy deputized his brother (also his attorney general) Robert Kennedy to personally oversee the CIA's campaign against Castro. Typical of the Kennedy administration's highly informal style, Bobby Kennedy bypassed CIA Director John McCone and demanded regular progress reports from Desmond FitzGerald, a dashing CIA officer who became head of the CIA Special Affairs Staff (SAS) at the beginning of 1963, charged with doing whatever he could to eliminate the Cuban leader. The bizarre events that were to unfold have fueled generations of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.

The winter FitzGerald took over the Cuban operation, he made clear to his troops that he wanted results. FitzGerald's executive officer, Sam Halpern, tried to show him an organizational chart of the Special Affairs Staff, but FitzGerald said he didn't want to see it; he didn't want to be bothered with bureaucratic detail. "But Des. . .," Halpern protested. "You do it," said FitzGerald. He refused to sign the chart or even look at it.

During the summer and early fall, five commando raids were launched against Castro's economic infrastructure, in the hopes of "destabilizing" the regime. The raids were costly: Twenty-five CIA agents, Cuban exiles recruited as commandos, were killed or captured. Though it was doubtful that the commandos would bring down Castro by knocking down some telephone poles or by petty acts of sabotage (the negligible Cuban underground was instructed to leave faucets running and light bulbs burning to waste energy), FitzGerald was determined to keep trying.

"We were saying, `Please don't expect that any one of these things is going to be a catalyst'," recalled Ted Shackley, the Miami station chief. "But FitzGerald felt under pressure to make these things work, and the pressure came from Robert Kennedy. He'd say, `I saw Bobby,' or `I ran into Bobby. I saw him in Middleburg. Here's what we got to crank up for next month.' We would say, tactfully. We can make it work. But the question is, will these events bring Castro down?'"

Halpern said he began to "dread coming in to work in the morning," especially Monday mornings after FitzGerald had all weekend to "run into" Kennedy and think up his own schemes--"all these harebrained ideas," as Halpern described a series of plots that would seem like black comedy when they surfaced later during the Church Committee hearings. "[Bobby]," said Halpern bluntly, "reinforced [FitzGerald's] worst instincts."

By the time FitzGerald took over the Cuba operation, the CIA had pretty well given up on using the mob. The plots of Bill Harvey, FitzGerald's predecessor as head of the Cuba group, to enlist the Mafia had gone nowhere. In the spring of 1962, Harvey had given John Rosselli, his mob contact, four poison capsules and assured him "they would work anywhere and at any time with any thing." Harvey and Miami station chief Shackley also rented a U-Haul truck, filled it with $5,000 worth of explosives and weapons, left the van in a parking lot, and handed the keys to Rosselli.

But Rosselli's Cuban agents were unable--or perhaps never really tried-to kill Castro. In February 1963, just as FitzGerald was taking over Cuban operations, Harvey had a drunken farewell dinner with Rosselli, with whom he had become pals (They shared a hatred of Bobby Kennedy. FBI gumshoes, who had Rosselli under routine surveillance, looked on in disbelief.

The amicable divorce from the mob did not mean an end to attempts to kill Castro. FitzGerald was forced to come up with more schemes. His inclination in these matters was to exploit the hobbies of his targets. With Indonesian President Sukarno, it had been airline stewardesses. With Castro, it was underwater swimming.

Before FitzGerald arrived to take over the Cuban operation, a CIA officer had suggested killing Castro by poisoning his diving suit. The Technical Services Division (TSD) purchased a suit, which it contaminated with fungus spores that would cause a chronic skin disease. The mouthpiece on the breathing apparatus was treated with tuberculosis bacilli. To deliver the suit, the CIA wanted to recruit James B. Donovan, the American lawyer negotiating the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners from Cuba. Donovan had already given Castro a (noncontaminated) wet suit, however, and the scheme was discarded. It is a mystery how anyone imagined that the plot would not be easily traced--the suit was to be a gift, after all, of the United States.

FitzGerald continued to look beneath the waves for a method of eliminating his target. His idea was an exploding seashell, to be placed on the ocean floor where Castro liked to go skin diving, "He came in with this bright idea," Halpern recalled. FitzGerald's staff asked how he planned to make sure that Castro picked up the right shell. "Put a neon sign on it?" asked Halpern. TSD had boasted they could make a bomb out of anything, but this request stumped even Dr. Gottlieb's men. "Des thought this was a put-up job by me and TSD," said Halpern. "He was really mad. `The President wants this,' he said."

Understanding the relationship between FitzGerald and Robert Kennedy is necessary if one is to make sense of FitzGerald's actions as chief of covert action for Cuba. RFK bewildered FitzGerald. At first, he found the President's younger brother to be bumptious. But as FitzGerald watched the younger Kennedy go to work on the CIA, he was encouraged by Kennedy's boldness, his willingness to cut through the bureaucracy and demand results. But he also found Kennedy imperious and a little reckless. In their father, FitzGerald's children observed wariness and ambivalence toward Kennedy--contempt mixed with deference and even uncharacteristic subservience.

Bobby was a force of nature, willing to bully anyone. "He could sack a town and enjoy it," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor remarked after watching the attorney general chew out the Special Group, all senior government officials. "Bob Kennedy was very difficult to deal with," said Thomas Parrott, the Special Group's secretary. "He was arrogant; he knew it all; he knew the answer to everything. He sat there, tie down, chewing gum, his feet up on the desk. His threats were transparent. It was, `If you don't do it, I'll tell my big brother on you.'"

There is more than a little irony to the picture of FitzGerald manipulated by an amateur gamesman. That is precisely the way the "professionals" in the agency had felt about FitzGerald when he arrived from Wall Street in 1950. The difference is that FitzGerald, though cold at times, was a gentleman, while Kennedy, though capable of warmth, was not. FitzGerald had become a professional over time, and he had reason to bridle at the cavalier quality of Bobby Kennedy's leadership. Although FitzGerald was too responsive to Kennedy for Halpern's taste, he was also no pushover. FitzGerald was a formidable figure, and he resisted some of Kennedy's more unreasonable demands. At a meeting on April 3, 1963, RFK proposed sending commando raids of a hundred to five hundred men to blow up factories and attack military bases. FitzGerald calmly noted that "if such groups could be landed, it would probably be impossible for them to survive any length of time."

But FitzGerald could not escape Kennedy's incessant demands. While at FitzGerald's country house, FitzGerald's nephew Albert Francke recalled overhearing his uncle say, firmly and loudly into the telephone one Sunday afternoon in 1963, "No, Bobby, we can't do that."

FitzGerald's daughter Joan Denny remembered her father entering into a towering rage upon learning that Bobby had been meeting privately with Cuban exiles. RFK was entertaining Cuban exiles at his house, Hickory Hill, and calling them at their apartments at the Ebbitt Hotel in downtown Washington, where they were housed by the CIA. FitzGerald was very wary of the Cuban exiles. "I have dealt with a very rich assortment of exiles in the past," he wrote his daughter Frances in June 1963, "but none can compare with the Cuban group for genuine stupidity and militant childishness. At times I feel sorry for Castro--a sculptor in silly putty." Having the attorney general freelance with the Cuban exile community was, FitzGerald felt, an invitation to disaster.

The exiles were even granted an audience with the President, who promised to avenge the Bay of Pigs. FitzGerald may have noted with apprehension that one of the exiles escorted into the Oval Office, Tony Varona, had been hired earlier by the CIA's mob contact, Johnny Rosselli, to make an attempt to kill Castro. To bring an assassin into the Oval Office was hardly the way to preserve plausible deniability.

Enter AMLASH

In the many attempts to get rid of Fidel Castro, the CIA had always been confounded by the lack of a good delivery system--an assassin who was at once close to Castro and willing to kill him. In the fall of 1963, FitzGerald's attention turned to a Cuban major, Rolando Cubela Secades, code name AMLASH.

First recruited as an agent by the CIA in 1961, Cubela had access to Castro and, equally important, experience as an assassin. In 1959, as a student revolutionary, he had shot and killed Batista's chief of military intelligence. Cubela had grown disenchanted with Castro and wanted to lead a coup against him. He was willing to kill Castro, though the word "assassinate" offended him; he preferred "eliminate." In October 1963, he told his CIA handlers that he wanted a show of support from the United States government. Cubela asked to meet personally with Robert F. Kennedy.

This demand was impossible, but FitzGerald agreed to meet with Cubela as RFK's "personal representative." FitzGerald sent word to AMLASH that he would see him at a CIA safe house in Paris on October 29. He came to regret this decision.

For a senior CIA official with close ties to the White House to meet with a foreign asset to discuss an assassination plot was highly unorthodox, even in that freewheeling era. It broke the rules of trade craft, which seek to build in deniability and secrecy through the use of cut-outs--go-betweens who are kept in the dark about the identities of their true masters--and by restricting access to information to those who need to know. FitzGerald was a careful professional, but in this case his activist instinct, abetted by RFK's prodding, got the better of his judgment.

The Special Affairs Staff objected to the idea of a meeting between their chief and AMLASH. The SAS counterintelligence officer, Joseph Langosch, warned FitzGerald that Cubela might be a "dangle"--a double agent recruited by Castro to penetrate the American plots against him. Certainly Cubela was "insecure," in the jargon of counterintelligence. He was said to be haunted by the memory of pulling the trigger while Batista's intelligence chief was smiling at him. With the CIA, he had indignantly refused to take a lie-detector test. The Cubans were notoriously leaky, while Castro's security service, the DGI, had been well trained by the East Germans, who had a knack for working double agents.

FitzGerald's boss, Richard Helms, "shared the qualms [of the SAS staff]." As the head of the clandestine service, he could have vetoed the trip. But," Helms later explained, "I was also getting my ass beaten. You should have enjoyed the experience of Bobby Kennedy rampant on your back." Helms signed off on FitzGerald's meeting with Cubela. Although FitzGerald was going in Robert Kennedy's name, Richard Helms decided it was "unnecessary" to tell the attorney general, whom he regarded as an even greater risk-taker than FitzGerald. "Bobby wouldn't have backed away," said Helms. "He probably would have gone himself." It shows the level of pressure felt by the CIA that Helms, normally careful to cover his back, didn't even bother to get Kennedy's authorization.

On October 21, FitzGerald cabled his daughter Frances: "Arriving Paris October 29 10:15 A.M. KLM 403 frabjous Tuesday 29th beamish birthday." ("Frabjous" and "beamish" are expressions of delight from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. At noon on the 29th, FitzGerald had a cheery birthday lunch with his daughter. At 5:30 P.M. that afternoon he met at a CIA safe house with the man he hoped would finally eliminate Fidel Castro.

FitzGerald used a false name (James Clark) but no disguise when he met Cubela. AMLASH "spoke repeatedly of the need for an assassination weapon. In particular, he wanted a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights or some other weapon that could be used to kill Castro from a distance," FitzGerald later recounted. FitzGerald responded that he "wanted no part of such a scheme." Cubela was told that "the United States does not do such things."

Or so FitzGerald told the CIA's inspector general, who was preparing a report in the spring of 1967 on the agency's assassination attempts. "The written record," the inspector general notes, "tells a somewhat different story." A memo prepared at the time by Nestor Sanchez, the case officer who was also at the meeting, stated that "nothing of an operational nature was discussed." Cubela was "satisfied with the policy discussion." After the meeting he asked the case officer what "technical support" the United States would provide to carry out the "policy," by which he presumably meant the violent overthrow of Castro. Testifying before the Church Committee in 1975, the case officer stated that Cubela made it clear that for a coup to work, Castro would have to be assassinated first. There is no indication that FitzGerald disagreed or refused to provide "technical support."

In fact, on November 19, 1963, FitzGerald approved of "telling Cubela he would be given a cache inside Cuba. Cache could, if he requested it, include . . . high power rifles with scopes." The memorandum for the record also noted that "C/SAS [FitzGerald] requested written reports on AMLASH operation be kept to a minimum." A second meeting between Cubela and his CIA case officer was set up at the Paris safe house to convey this message. At the last minute FitzGerald decided to throw in another offering to Cubela: a poison pen.

Cubela was looking for some small "exotic" weapon--a dart gun, perhaps--he could use with deadly effect in close quarters. Cubela, a medical doctor, told the CIA he was sure they could come up with some clever "technical means." The elves in the Operation Division of the Office of Medical Services worked through the night and produced a ball-point pen--a Paper Mate--rigged with a hypodermic syringe. The needle was "so fine," Dr. Edward Gunn of Medical Services later boasted to the inspector general, "that the victim would hardly feel it when it was inserted--he compared it with the scratch from a shirt with too much starch." Cubela was to be told that he could load the pen with Blackleaf 40, a fatal nicotine-based insecticide available at the time on the shelves of hardware stores.

Retribution?

On November 22, 1963, Des FitzGerald had just finished hosting a lunch for an old friend of the CIA, a foreign diplomat, at the City Tavern Club in Georgetown, when he was summoned from the private dining room by the maitre d'. FitzGerald returned "as white as a ghost," recalled Sam Halpern. Normally erect and purposeful, FitzGerald was walking slowly, with his head down. "The President has been shot," he said. The lunch immediately broke up. On the way out the door Halpern anxiously said, "I hope this has nothing to do with the Cubans." FitzGerald mumbled, "Yeah, well, we'll see."

In the 15-minute car ride back to Langley, FitzGerald just stared straight ahead. FitzGerald knew that, in September, Castro had threatened to retaliate against assassination attempts. "United States leaders should think that if they are aiding in terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe," the Cuban leader had publicly declared. The warning that Cubela might be a "dangle," that he might be secretly working for Castro, took an ominous new meaning. Now FitzGerald had to wonder: Had Castro killed Kennedy before Kennedy could kill him?

In Paris, Cubela had just finished asking for 20 hand grenades, two high-powered rifles with telescopic sights, and 20 pounds of C-4 explosive, to be dropped on a friend's farm, when he was told that President Kennedy was assassinated. He was "visibly moved," according to the case officer's report. "Why do such things happen to good people?" he asked. Within a few hours the case officer received a cable from FitzGerald in Washington telling him, he later recalled, that "everything was off." The case officer was told to break off contact with AMLASH and return immediately to Washington.

CIA headquarters at Langley was in a state of chaos when FitzGerald and Halpern returned from the City Tavern Club. "We all went to the battle stations," recalled Richard Helms. "Was this a plot? Who was pulling the strings? And who was next?" In the basement vault occupied by the Special Affairs Staff, "all kinds of theories popped up," said Halpern. "Was it Castro? We had no intelligence. We didn't think Castro was that crazy. We thought maybe it had to do with KGB `wet affairs'--sabotage and assassination."

When Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested early that afternoon, the CIA began to piece together his background, which was worrisome. He had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, and then redefected back to the United States in 1962. More recently, in September, he had been spotted by CIA cameras entering the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, ostensibly to get a visa. While there, Oswald had been interviewed by a KGB agent, Valery Kostikov. This was a startling discovery. Kostikov was a member of the KGB's 13th Department, which handled "wet affairs."

The deputy chief of the CIA's Soviet Division, T. H. Bagley, immediately saw the sinister implications. "Putting it baldly," he wrote to his superiors on Saturday, November 23, "was Oswald, wittingly or unwittingly, part of a 16t to murder President Kennedy in Dallas?" The CIA's counterintelligence staff began working around the clock to see whom else Kostikov had been talking to in his Mexico City lair.

In due course, one of the names that turned up was Rolando Cubela--the very man FitzGerald had hoped would kill Castro. This was potentially a vital link in trying to solve the mystery of Kennedy's death. The counter intelligence staff put out a routine "trace" to see if anyone in the agency knew Cubela.

FitzGerald remained silent. Technically, he did not have to answer. Tucked away in its basement vault, compartmented from the rest of the agency, the Special Affairs Staff had received a special exemption from queries by the counterintelligence staff. Still, under the circumstances, it would seem proper to cooperate in the CIA's own investigation of the President's murder.

But FitzGerald was wary of the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. The legendary mole hunter was growing increasingly drunken and conspiratorial in the early 1960s. As he downed serial martinis over four-hour lunches at Chez Nicoise in Georgetown, he would puzzle over counterintelligence cases that had been sitting on his desk for months, even years. To him, the Sino-Soviet split was just a trick designed to lull the West, and any CIA official, up to and including the director, was a potential mole.

What would he have made of Cubela and his link to Kostikov? FitzGerald thought Angleton was mentally unstable. If Angleton was allowed into the SAS vault, Castro was safe; all action against him would stop. Angleton never did catch any moles, for all his machinations. "There is not a goddamned thing Angleton or his henchmen could have come up with," insisted Halpern in 1993. "Des thought, `What the hell is Jim going to tell me?'"

FitzGerald had never told the director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, about Cubela. McCone was a wealthy Texas businessman who had been brought in to replace Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs. An outsider and a bit of a moralist, he had been kept ignorant of all the CIA's assassination plots. In the "need-to-know" world of the CIA, Richard Helms had decided that McCone did not need to know. Authority for the assassination plots was apparently something that could "spring forward" after a change of CIA directors--or even presidents. To Helms, the unrelenting pressure from Bobby Kennedy had sufficed as authorization. Besides, McCone did not want to know. When the subject of assassination was briefly raised (and quickly suppressed) at a meeting of the Special Group in August 1962, McCone, a good Catholic, had worried that if he got "involved in something like this" he might get excommunicated.

FitzGerald was sitting in front of the television with his wife on Sunday morning, November 24, when Jack Ruby stepped from a crowd and shot Oswald. FitzGerald began to cry, for the first and last time in his wife's experience. "Now we'll never know," he said.

FitzGerald never said anything more about it, and he kept his secrets even from the investigators of the Warren Commission, which was never informed about AMLASH or any of the CIA's Mafia plots. ("They didn't ask," said Richard Helms.) Still, it would be a mistake to make too much of the mystery. To be sure, Angleton never got over suspecting that the Russians or Cubans plotted to kill Kennedy. He thought the Russian defector Yuri Nosenko, who claimed that the Kremlin was innocent, was a KGB plant to throw the CIA off the trail. But most reputable students of the Kennedy assassination have concluded that Khrushchev and Castro did not kill Kennedy, if only because neither man wanted to start World War IlI.

Somewhat more plausible suspects are renegade Cuban exiles, conceivably abetted by rogue CIA agents. With his distrust and contempt for exiles, FitzGerald must have worried at least a little on this score. The FBI had been cracking down on extremist groups like Alpha 66 that wanted to overthrow Castro (the agency worried they would trip over their own plots). There had been considerable grumbling in the exile community in Miami that Kennedy had betrayed the Brigade at the Bay of Pigs. Had some hotheads tried to get even? Curiously, FitzGerald did not try very hard to investigate. "I was just told to watch the island," said Ted Shackley. "The mainland was the FBI's territory." The officers of JMWAVE, the CIA's anti-cuba operation, talked to some of their informants, but mostly they left the job to the FBI--which did very little, according to a report by a congressional committee set up in 1979 to re-investigate the Kennedy assassination.

FitzGerald had trouble giving up on Cubela. The CIA tried to put the Cuban major in touch with exile groups that might supply him with weapons on their own. Finally, in 1965, AMLASH was cut loose. The counterintelligence men at last convinced FitzGerald that Cubela was a poor security risk. Indeed, Castro was on to him: In March 1966, Cubela was arrested and tried for treason. Castro commuted his death sentence, possibly for cooperating with his secret police. For the CIA, a strange era was over.

Evan Thomas is Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek. This article is an adaptation-from The Very Best Men (Simon and Schuster, 1995). Printed by permission.