Did Fidel Castro Kill JFK?

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0:24The Cubans at the embassy must have first thought Oswald was a CIA provocateur. Thus, they would need to do considerable checking with headquarters, the KGB, fraternal organisations and intelligence services, even radical groups influenced by them, but perhaps not under their control. But they would also have given him a good dose of their trabajo politico, that is, plenty of propaganda and indoctrination in Cuban revolutionary policies and concerns. That would have undoubtedly included denunciations of the CIA and the attempts to kill Castro. They would have encouraged him to go back to Texas and get busy on their behalf by supporting their positions, but they would not have enlisted him in an assassination plot.

1:05They, however, would have planted the seed in him. The trapejo politico would have agitated him, given him new, even violent impulses. This, I think, is where Oswald got the idea for the assassination. Well, welcome, members new and old, to the Rest is Classified, Declassified Club. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And this is the third and final part of our special series just for you members. Welcome, new members, especially, as well as older secret squirrels, where we've been looking on the back of our six part series on the CIA and JFK at the theories around the assassination of President Kennedy.

1:48and we are keen to hear from your ideas and hear your theories about what might have been behind it. Once we get to the end today of our kind of look at three of the big theories, we just heard from the mooch challenging the establishment position of David McCloskey that was a lone government and proposing in this rather forceful manner that it was, in fact, the mob what done it. we previously looked at the cia position you know that the deep state the military industrial complex which you know at one point i kind of had some tendencies towards had done it in the first episode this time we're going to look at cuba and fidel what you heard me read at the start was the assessment of a former cia officer quoted in a book by brian littell describing the theory that there was a Cuban connection to Oswald, which is at the kind of heart of this story.

2:42I think this is an interesting one, isn't it? Because it's not quite the full conspiracy, but it does take you slightly away from the lone gunman idea. And it is the idea that Fidel Castro, knowing that the Kennedys and the CIA are trying to kill him, get to Kennedy first with their own mission, using Oswald in particular in some way as their kind of agent. Undoubtedly, Gordon, Castro has motive to kill John F. Kennedy, right? I mean, as we laid out in our series on the main pod, Kennedy, the CIA, Bobby had been behind numerous plots to kill Fidel. And it seems reasonable, in particular based off of the testimony of Cuban defectors, intelligence defectors in the years since the assassination.

3:33I think it's quite reasonable to believe that at least in some of these plots, Castro had very specific knowledge of the plot and the fact that the CIA was behind it. So for example, one of the poison pill plots that we discussed in the podcast series, specifically the version that ends with the botulinum toxin pills bursting open in the freezer. They're put in this freezer in a Havana restaurant and Castro shows up and orders a milkshake. And the mob's asset in Havana is working at this restaurant. That plot, of course, goes nowhere. Castro enjoys his milkshake unimpaired. But defector reporting since, along with testimony from Bill Harvey, who had been the Cuba task force chief at the time, suggest that the Cubans had penetrated that plot.

4:29In some sources, they'll claim that Castro believed that he had actually prevented 30 plus assassinations on his person in the years since he took power in 1959. Of course, not all of these are perpetrated by the CIA. Some of them are by Cuban dissidents and exile groups and all of that. But I think as a point, a pretty strong point in the column of Castro having motive, not only is he generally aware that Kennedy wants him gone, he's specifically aware of plots to take his life. So there's some solid motive on that front. And Castro also drops some hints, doesn't he, that he's going to do something about it?

5:11Yeah, so in September of 1963, so just a few months before John F. Kennedy's assassinated on September 7th, Castro is at the Brazilian embassy in Havana. And he pulls aside a UPI reporter named Daniel Harker, who was sort of a favorite contact of Castro's on the Havana press circuit. And Castro tells Harker that if the U.S. continues to meet with terrorists who are out to get him, then its own leaders, American leaders, will not be safe. And Castro says, we are prepared to fight them in answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.

5:57So it is an unprecedented statement by Castro. It's probably the first time he's directly threatened American leaders. And very interestingly, up in New Orleans, where Lee Harvey Oswald at this time is working and living. We know that Oswald was a regular newspaper reader, and the New Orleans Times' Picayune carries the story on page seven under the headline, Castro Blasts Raids on Cuba, says U.S. leaders imperiled by aid to rebels. So the timing's interesting. It's very likely that Oswald would have read that article. I mean, he's obsessed with Cuba. So we know that by the time we get to September of 1963, that Castro is aware of the plotting against him.

6:51I mean, frankly, he's already experienced Bay of Pigs, so he understands the US government is trying to overthrow him. Whether Castro draws a distinction between efforts to topple his regime and kill him, I think is up for debate. I think he probably sees them as kind of one in the same. So in his mind, he's been the subject of a Kennedy-backed war that goes back to 1961. 1961, he's now threatening American leaders. And the guy who's going to go and shoot Kennedy a few months later is aware of Castro's intentions here. And the timing becomes very interesting because three weeks later, so in late September, the last week of September, 1963, Oswald will visit the Cuban mission in Mexico City.

7:43He's going to spend a week there. We're going to talk more about this trip later because, spoiler alert, a lot of the nuance to this theory around the Cubans and a lot of the as yet unexplored or frankly lost to history facts about Lee Harvey Oswald and his motivations and what might have compelled him to kill Kennedy, I think all tie back to Mexico City. And the historical record on this is an absolute mess. But in any case, Oswald visits the Cuban mission. He visits the Soviet embassy on that same trip. And the CIA is going to know all about this because it has a pretty elaborate photo surveillance and wiretapping operation targeting both embassies.

8:29One of the things that comes out in recent documents. Yeah. Exactly. And we'll come back to this. So three weeks after reading an article about Castro threatening American leaders, Oswald is meeting with Cubans in Mexico City. Now, this is all happening, and this will link back to a story that we teased a bit in the main pod. And so I'd really encourage listeners, if you haven't yet listened to the last episode of our series, to do that before you listen to this one. But the CIA is meeting in this few months of 1963, the fall of 1963, with a source codenamed AM Lash in Brazil to discuss the possibility of a coup against Castro.

9:12The broader CIA effort in mid to late 1963 was focused on still killing Castro, which we'll come to, but in particular, trying to find military officers around Castro who might be interested in taking him down with a coup. The idea here is that killing Castro would be kind of the opening salvo for toppling his regime and orchestrating an overthrow by members of this kind of military junta. We should say the Cuban Foreign Intelligence Service is called the DGI. And there haven't been that many defectors who have come over from Cuba, but there have been a few. And in particular, there was a rash of them in the 1980s and 1990s who defected to the states and started to share their stories.

10:01And the testimony of those defectors suggest that the source, A.M. Lash, who is a Cuban military officer named Cubela, suggests that Cubela may have actually been a double agent, a dangle by Castro, and that the CIA took the bait.