Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann
New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005, h/b, $33.00 <www.ultimatesacrificethebook.com>
There is 900 pages of this, in the first 250 or so of which the authors demonstrate that there was a Kennedy brothers plan to create an internal coup in Cuba, which was set to go on 1 December 1963. They offer a sequence in which, having rejected Lansdale’s Northwoods proposal (1) to fabricate a Cuban ‘outrage’ to provide a pretext for the reinvasion of Cuba, the Kennedys approved a scheme – which they apparently thought more subtle and more internationally defensible – in which the US military would intervene in Cuba to ‘stabilise’ it after an internal coup (organised by the US) had got rid of Castro. The authors write of this as though it was a secret at the time, at any rate within Washington. But as the authors show repeatedly, the operation was leaking like a sieve from the anti-Castro Cuban end; and the anti-Castro Cubans were awash in American money and case officers. The politicians may not have known but I would bet the CIA and the military did.
Robert Kennedy played the Nixon role in the original Bay of Pigs plan: he was the White House action officer. The Kennedys had good reason for doing something: a Presidential election was due in 1964 and they knew that if they didn’t ‘resolve’ the Cuban situation their Republican opponents would use it against them. There can’t have been much above ‘Cuba’ on the Kennedys’ re-election agendum.
There has been a great deal of debate about the Kennedys’ role in the CIA plots against Castro, with Kennedyphiles trying to fend off the charges of Camelot’s involvement. This argument should now cease. The authors show beyond dispute, in overwhelming, almost tedious detail that the Kennedys were planning a coup which would result in Castro’s death. But being a lawyer as well as a Catholic, Robert had apparently persuaded himself that this was different: not a straightforward invasion, not an assassination, but the promotion of an internal coup by dissidents within the Castro regime. Castro would die but the Kennedys would not have ordered it or caused it directly.
After the Kennedys’ coup plan the authors offer an extremely intricate version of the Mafia-dunnit thesis wrapped around with enormous research into Cuba exile politics, much of which should have been siphoned off into another book.
They rehearse the fragments known about an apparent assassination attempt in Chicago on 2 November (and the fate of the first black Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden, who was framed on a counterfeiting charge after trying to tell the Warren Commission about the Chicago attempt). But how serious was the Chicago event? Some men were arrested and then released. No weapons were found. That’s all we know. They tell us about a hitherto unnoticed apparent attempt in Tampa on 18 November. Even less is known about this. We don’t know the names of those involved, nor the sponsors (if any), nor even if the attempts were serious. Both ‘plots’ were exposed by tip-offs.
The authors assert that all three attempts – Dallas being the third – were the mob trying to kill JFK; that the mob created three identical plots: ambush by rifle fire during motorcades with a patsy on the scene to be given to the police. Not only is this miles beyond the known capabilities (or ambitions) of the mob, they don’t actually have new (or sufficient) evidence. They have the usual evidence of mob leaders being wire-tapped saying (before the shooting) how much they wanted him dead and (after the shooting) how pleased they were that he was. There is some hearsay of the ‘X said Y’ form; and there is the story of middle ranking mobster, John Martino, who apparently had advance knowledge. But so did Joseph Milteer, a far-right activist; and so did Rose Cheramie, the junkie heroin courier, a long way down the organised crime foodchain. Was their knowledge of the same plot? Or were there several plots? At any rate this trio of people – and who knows how many others? –knew something. But on the actual shootings there is nothing here. Of mob or Cuban hitmen on Dealey Plaza – or in Chicago or Tampa – there is no evidence.
The case they do make is that after the event Robert Kennedy and the entire military-intelligence complex in the US had a major interest in not revealing anything about the several operations that were going on against Castro. The Kennedy ‘coup’ plan was the politically most sensitive (the CIA were running others) and it was this, say the authors, which prevented Robert and the rest of the Kennedy intimates from pursuing JFK’s death.
One of those intimates provides the single most striking new information on the actual shooting. For the first time to my knowledge, Dave Powers told the authors (p. 15) that he and another Kennedy aide, Kenneth O’Donnell, saw the shots from the grassy knoll from their car in the motorcade but were persuaded not to challenge the Warren Commission verdict. Powers also says that the reason the JFK limo almost stopped after the shooting was the driver’s fear that he was driving into an ambush.
Notes
1 Northwoods documents are at <www.WantToKnow.info/010501operationnorth woods>