Washington Decoded
11 July 2007
Camelot and Cuba
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
By David Talbot.
Free Press. 478 pp. $28
Editor’s Note: David Talbot’s book on John and Robert Kennedy, Brothers, has garnered
almost as much attention as Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustive book on the assassination of
President Kennedy, Reclaiming History. Bugliosi staunchly defends the finding that Lee
Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed the president, while Talbot is squarely in the camp of
those who believe JFK was killed by men breathing together.[1]
Both books cannot be true, so which one is false? Two major reviews of Talbot’s book, one
in The New York Times and the other in The Washington Post, were both hedged and overly
credulous, written as they were by authors who could not challenge Talbot based upon a
superior knowledge of the facts. Washington DeCoded thought it was time to subject Brothers
to examination by an author, Don Bohning, with expertise in some of Brothers’ subject
matter.
Bohning covered Latin America for The Miami Herald for almost four decades. His firsthand knowledge of the Cuban exile community, the CIA, and their anti-Castro activities from
the late 1950s into the late 1970s is probably unrivaled among American journalists. Before
and after retiring, Bohning spent 10 years researching the U.S. government’s secret war
against Cuba, and in 2005 published a reliable and unsparing book about Washington’s
fixation on Cuba from 1959 to 1965.
While Bohning does not address the assassination conspiracy issue head-on, it is reasonable
to extrapolate that the defects he identifies in Brothers apply to the book as a whole.
By Don Bohning
David Talbot believes John F. Kennedy’s assassination was not the deranged act of a
lone gunman, but the result of a much larger conspiracy.
Talbot’s prime suspects are identified in Brothers’ opening pages: “The CIA, Mafia
and Cuba—Bobby [Kennedy] knew they were intertwined. The CIA had formed a
sinister alliance with underworld bosses to assassinate Fidel Castro, working with mobconnected Cuban exile leaders.”[2] Consequently, immediately after the assassination of
his brother the president, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy began hunting for the
responsible party within this trio of possible culprits, according to Talbot.
A central thesis of Brothers is that Robert Kennedy only gave lip service to the U.S.
government’s official verdict. While publicly endorsing the Warren Commission’s
findings of a lone gunman, RFK believed the assassination was a conspiracy and quietly
dedicated himself to identifying those responsible. This quest, in turn, helped fuel his
Washington Decoded
1968 presidential run, which ended tragically with his own assassination in June of that
year. Talbot was a teen-age volunteer in that campaign in which RFK won the California
primary, only to be mortally wounded minutes after his victory speech. Undoubtedly, this
was a formative moment in Talbot’s life; unfortunately, he shows little evidence of
having moved on from a 16-year-old’s starry-eyed view of the Kennedys.
An inextricable sub-theme of Brothers involves the U.S. government’s efforts,
beginning in late 1959 under President Eisenhower and persisting until 1965, to rid Cuba
of Fidel Castro. Essentially, Talbot contends that unintended consequences from these
efforts, or “blowback” in intelligence lingo, precipitated John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
I do not profess to be a student of the Kennedy presidency or the assassination per se,
yet I do know something about the U.S. government’s secret war against Cuba. And
when it comes to the subject of Cuba and the Kennedys, Brothers is not only a
disappointment, but strives to turn that history upside down. Talbot attempts to do this via
a familiar tactic: he draws from the recollections of staunch Kennedy friends and insiders,
with proven track records of bending the historical record so that it reflects kindly on the
Kennedy brothers. But in a new twist, Talbot also dredges up on the most dubious
sources imaginable to further his argument.
An example of the latter is Angelo Murgado Kennedy, a Bay of Pigs veteran who
claims to have been close to Robert Kennedy.[3] Had Talbot asked any of Murgado’s
fellow veterans, he would have heard him described as a “persistent liar,” “a charlatan,”
and a man with “no credibility”—and these are the printable comments.[4]
Murgado’s name first surfaced in Joan Mellen’s risible, mind-numbing conspiracy
book, Farewell to Justice, in which she defended the indefensible—the 1967-69
persecution of Clay Shaw by an out-of-control New Orleans prosecutor named Jim
Garrison. Prior to Mellen’s 2005 book, Murgado had been virtually unheard of amongst
the Cuban fighters identified in the rather robust literature about the Bay of Pigs.[5] Yet in
Mellen’s book Murgado suddenly appeared as a member of the inner circle—he was part
of RFK’s intelligence “brain trust” on Cuba.[6]
Curious about Murgado’s bona fides, right after Mellen’s book appeared I asked
Erneido Oliva, the deputy commander of the Bay of Pigs brigade, and the late Rafael
Quintero, one of the first Cuban nationals to enlist in the brigade, about Murgado. Oliva
and Quintero (who died in October 2006) were both known for having grown close to
Robert Kennedy in the aftermath of the debacle. They told me then they had never heard
of Murgado. Oliva went further and wrote in an e-mail that Mellen’s description of
Murgado as having been part of RFK’s “brain trust” was BS, and spelled it with capital
letters. When asked again about Murgado in light of Talbot’s book, Oliva repeated that he
had never heard of Murgado until I brought up his name in 2005.
Murgado is not instrumental to Talbot’s tale, but he is exceptionally useful. Through
him Talbot buttresses the notion that hard-line Cuban exiles hated President Kennedy,
presumably to the point where they were motivated to kill him. Murgado, elaborating on
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the tale he first told Mellen, was so alarmed by the murderous talk in Miami’s exile
community that he approached RFK and offered to keep an eye on the most dangerous
exile elements for the attorney general. Murgado told Talbot how he and two other
prominent Cuban exiles met with RFK at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach. “I was
thinking we have to control and keep a sharp look on our Cubans, the ones that were
hating Kennedy,” Talbot quotes Murgado as saying. “I was afraid that one of our guys
would go crazy. Bobby told us to come up with a plan and do it . . . . He was fanatic
about his brother, he would do anything to take care of him.”[7]
In the summer of 1963, Murgado’s alleged surveillance work led him to New Orleans,
of all places, where he came across a “curious gringo” named Lee Harvey Oswald.[8]
Murgado’s team, Talbot writes, “came to the conclusion that Oswald was an FBI
informant,” and after returning to Florida the dutiful Murgado reported on his
surveillance targets, including “the mysterious Oswald.”[9]
Are we really supposed to find this bunkum credible? To believe Murgado is to believe
that Robert Kennedy preferred to entrust his brother’s security to an obscure Cuban exile
rather than the one agency actually charged with protecting the president, the U.S. Secret
Service. More to the point, Murgado is a former building inspector for the city of Miami
who plead guilty in 1999 to accepting bribes in return for zoning favors.[10] Even
criminals sometimes tell the truth, of course, but surely Murgado’s word is subject to a
big discount, and his claims are not to be believed absent rock-solid corroboration. In
place of confirmation, however, Talbot suggests that Murgado should be believed
because his story has “not been refuted.”[11]
Everything about Talbot’s credulous use of Murgado can also be applied to Talbot’s
use of unproven assertions allegedly made by E. Howard Hunt, the recently deceased
former CIA officer most noted for leading the Watergate break-in during the 1972
presidential campaign. Talbot supplies information that was not even directly propagated
by Hunt, but comes from his long-estranged son, St. John Hunt, a meth addict for 20
years, meth dealer for 10 of those years, and twice-convicted felon.[12]
St. John Hunt claims to have been privy to a death-bed confession by his father. E.
Howard Hunt allegedly recalled that in 1963, he was invited by Frank Sturgis (later, a
member of Hunt’s Watergate team) to a clandestine meeting at a CIA safe house in
Miami. During the alleged meeting, a group of men discussed “the big event” coming up,
which was a plot to kill President Kennedy. Late in the meeting, Sturgis ostensibly asked
Hunt, “Are you with us?”[13]
There are only a few problems with this story. Hunt, even when he was still alive, was
not known for his veracity. And Sturgis, whom I personally knew quite well in Miami
when he went by the name Frank Fiorini, was one source never to be believed or trusted,
someone who was rather notorious even in a field brimming with con men and
blowhards, most of whom hinted they were working for the CIA.[14]
Washington Decoded
Another example of Talbot’s creative use of innuendo involves the late Dave Morales,
a CIA officer of Hispanic origin who has been frequently linked by conspiracy theorists
to President Kennedy’s assassination. Guilt-by-innuendo is a familiar tactic of buffs
seeking to associate the CIA with the assassination. It’s exceedingly easy, given that the
careers of officers in the clandestine service, like Morales, were shrouded in secrecy. It’s
also cost-free. The libel is usually leveled when the target is dead, and like others who
have been fingered as complicit, Morales is deceased and cannot defend himself.
Talbot eagerly joins in the well-trod defamation of Morales. “He has been connected to
a bloody trail of CIA exploits,” writes Talbot, “from the 1954 Guatemala coup, to the
hunting and execution of Che Guevara in 1967, to the violent overthrow of Chile’s
Salvador Allende in 1973. (Morales later stated that he was in the palace when Allende
was killed.)”[15]
Having been part of the The Miami Herald’s coverage of both Guevara’s demise in
Bolivia and the Chilean coup d’état, I found Talbot’s assertion puzzling since I had never
heard of Morales being involved in either of these dramatic events. I contacted Tom
Clines, Morales’s friend and CIA colleague in the 1960s at both the JMWAVE (Miami)
station and later, in Southeast Asia. Clines stated flatly that Morales was neither involved
in Guevara’s capture in Bolivia, nor in Chile at the time of the coup against Allende.[16]
Clines’s denial was seconded by Larry Sternfield, the CIA station chief in La Paz at the
time of Guevera’s capture, and someone who most certainly would know if Morales had
been involved. Sternfield said during a recent telephone interview that “definitely no,”
Morales was not in Bolivia.[17]
Talbot’s thinly-sourced book (given the weighty allegations) provides no citation for
the claim that Morales was in Bolivia. With respect to Chile, Talbot cites Anthony
Summers’s 2000 book The Arrogance of Power.[18] Since both Talbot and Summers
exhibit a similar, elastic definition of the facts, citing Summers is not much of a
reference. But it’s actually worse than that.
Summers’s cited sources were Robert Dorff, a novelist and self-styled expert on the
JFK assassination, who reportedly once interviewed a childhood friend of Morales;
Gaeton Fonzi, who worked for the House Assassinations Committee as an investigator;
and Noel Twyman, a retired industrial engineer.[19] Dorff’s work is rightly considered
fictional, and his interview amounts to unsubstantiated hearsay.[20] In 1979, the House
panel flatly rejected all of Fonzi’s theories about CIA involvement, although that did not
stop him from propagating them in a 1993 book, The Last Investigation. In any case,
Fonzi does not put Morales in Chile.[21] Twyman’s revelation was contained in a
deservedly obscure 1997 book called Bloody Treason. And Twyman’s source for the
ostensibly damning allegation about Morales? Well, Twyman simply doesn’t cite a basis
for his assertion that Morales’s involvement in CIA activities “included heavy-duty
assassination operations such as murdering President Allende of Chile in 1973.”[22]
Washington Decoded
In this manner history is written, or at least Talbot’s version of it. Allegations never
proven in the first place are recycled, as if repeating them enough times will turn them
into the truth.
Notwithstanding these problems, there is something more troubling about this book
than Talbot’s factual errors, use of innuendo, and credulous reliance on such questionable
sources as Murgado and the Hunts. And that is Talbot’s persistent failure to provide the
full context of several pivotal events during the height of U.S. efforts to topple Fidel
Castro. Via the exclusion of many inconvenient facts, and the misrepresentation of
specific events, he leaves the reader with a distorted perception of what actually occurred.
The pattern is so persistent it appears to be calculated.
One example concerns Talbot’s rendering of a November 15, 1960, staff meeting of the
CIA’s Cuba Task Force, which was charged with organizing what eventually would
become the Bay of Pigs invasion the following April. This meeting was held in
anticipation of John Kennedy’s first briefing on the agency’s anti-Castro plans, to be
conducted in Palm Beach by CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, chief of the
CIA’s Directorate of Plans (covert operations).
According to a document first highlighted by CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer, author of a
multi-volume, partially-declassified internal history of the Bay of Pigs operation written
in the 1970s, by November the Cuba Task Force realized the agency’s initial plan had to
be scrapped:
The CIA’s original concept is now seen to be unachievable in the face
of the [internal security] controls Castro has instituted. There will not be
the internal unrest earlier believed possible, nor will the defenses permit
the type [of] strike first planned. Our second concept (1,500-3,000 man
force to secure an airstrip) is also now seen to be unachievable, except as a
joint Agency/DOD action . . .[23]
In Talbot’s hands, this one document is transformed from a notable observation by the
task force into proof positive that the CIA (Bissell, specifically) knew all along that the
operation was destined to fail, but did not level with the president-elect. (Bissell is a key
villain in Talbot’s tale, of course, because he was the CIA official who conceived of the
agency’s pact with the Mafia).[24] Talbot writes that Pfeiffer’s history “contained proof
that Bissell concealed [emphasis added] the operation’s bleak prospects from Kennedy
when he briefed him about it for the first time shortly after JFK’s election.”[25]
But any fair rendering of the document in context reveals that the Pfeiffer volume was
mute on the very point Talbot claims it proves. Nowhere does Pfeiffer provide evidence,
either one way or the other, about what Bissell actually said to Kennedy during the
briefing on Cuba. And with all the principals dead, it is impossible to know whether
Bissell concealed information from Kennedy as Talbot asserts.
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It is quite true that Bissell was later charged with not telling people what they needed to
know. This point was made to me repeatedly in extensive interviews and other
communications I had with Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins, the project director and
paramilitary chief, respectively, for the Bay of Pigs operation. Several specific instances
of Bissell’s uncommunicativeness up and down the chain of command were described in
my book, The Castro Obsession. But whether that occurred during this briefing of
President-elect Kennedy, at which Allen Dulles was also present, I have no idea. It’s
unlikely that anyone does, certainly not Talbot.
It’s worth remembering, too, that Kennedy’s briefing occurred at a time when the
concept of what would eventually become the Bay of Pigs invasion was undergoing
major changes. (Pfeiffer, the CIA historian, entitled the part in which the document is
cited “Changing Concepts”). Members of the Cuban Task Force expressed varying
opinions about the success of the covert project at different points in time, and plans were
adjusted accordingly. But no one involved in the planning believed that it was an utterly
hopeless and futile exercise six months before the invasion actually occurred, and that
Bissell systematically kept this internal estimate secret from the president-elect. It is
disingenuous of Talbot to claim, categorically, that this one document provides proof that
Bissell concealed information about the viability of the operation from Kennedy.[26]
Another striking example of how Talbot tweaks the facts to suit his bias pertains to a
controversial episode that occurred in the period immediately before the Bay of Pigs
landing, the reported call for the brigade to “mutiny” if the covert operation were called
off at the last minute. In Talbot’s telling there is nothing murky or unknown about this
episode. Rather, it was indicative of a CIA that was scarcely under the White House’s
control. As Talbot puts it, in early April, Bissell
sent a very different message to the military leaders of the Bay of Pigs
brigade in their Guatemala training camp. They were informed that “there
are forces in the administration trying to block the invasion” and if these
“forces” succeeded, the brigade leaders were to mutiny against their U.S.
advisers and proceed with the invasion. This stunning act of CIA defiance
would provoke a public furor when it was later revealed by Haynes
Johnson in his 1964 book about the Bay of Pigs.[27]
Johnson, then a 33-year old reporter with the Washington Star, wrote the first detailed
book on the Bay of Pigs, one based upon extensive research and interviews with four of
the top brigade leaders. And the mutiny anecdote did provoke a stir when The Bay of
Pigs: The Leaders’ Story of Brigade 2506 was published in 1964. But at no point did
Johnson suggest that Bissell sent the mutiny message (if, in fact, such a message was sent
at all). And in the four decades since Johnson’s book first appeared, no evidence has
surfaced to show that Bissell did what Talbot alleges, notwithstanding Talbot’s flat
assertion.
I investigated this episode quite carefully for my own book on the covert war against
Cuba. While there is little doubt something happened along these lines, the episode
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remains murky and the full truth will probably never be known. The story, as it originally
appeared in Johnson’s book, was based on the recollections of several Cuban leaders
interviewed for the book: José Pérez San Román, the brigade’s commander; Erneido
Oliva, its deputy commander; and Manuel Artime, political representative of the Cuban
Revolutionary Council, which was to be installed as the new government once the
invasion succeeded.
According to Johnson, in early April, a “Colonel Frank” (not Bissell) told the Cuban
exiles that “There were forces in the administration trying to block the invasion, and that
Frank might be ordered to stop it.”[28] Frank then suggested the Cubans prepare to
mutiny if the operation were canceled; they should ostentatiously take their CIA advisers
in custody, and proceed with the invasion as planned. “It cannot be determined what
bosses, if any, gave Frank such instructions,” Johnson wrote. “But Artime, San Román
and Oliva never doubted that he was speaking for his superiors.”[29]
“Colonel Frank” was in reality U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Frank Egan, the chief American
trainer in Guatemala, where the Cuban force was being whipped into shape for the
invasion. Erneido Oliva was the only one of the three brigade leaders involved who is
still alive. During my research, he provided me with a copy of his unpublished memoirs,
which describe this episode. Oliva recounted the story in essentially the same way
Johnson reported it, without any more clues about what “forces” in the administration
were opposed to the invasion, and who Frank was speaking for. To this day Oliva
remains convinced that Egan was not acting on his own, but has no idea who else might
have been involved.
In 2001, when I raised the matter with Marine Colonel Jack Hawkins, the invasion’s
paramilitary chief, he flatly rejected the notion that anyone back in Washington—
including, specifically, Richard Bissell—had authorized Egan to speak in such terms.
Egan, who died in 1999, refused a request from Pfeiffer to be interviewed for the CIA’s
internal history while it was being prepared in the 1970s. In fact, Egan’s only direct
remarks about this incident came during his May 1, 1961, testimony before the board of
inquiry into the Bay of Pigs presided over by General Maxwell Taylor, JFK’s senior
military adviser at the time.
At one point, Egan was asked, “What would have happened if the operation had been
called off after the first part of April?” His answer, spoken three years before Haynes
Johnson’s account appeared, confirmed—but in reverse—the notion that the Cubans
might ignore the wishes of their sponsor, and boldly take matters in their own hands. “It
would have depended upon the posture [the Cubans] were in at the time,” responded
Egan. “If it had been called off after they were actually on the way, they would have
taken over. They said that as a friend, we want you to direct all your people not to resist if
this comes about, because we don’t want anybody to get hurt. Consequently, I had all our
people turn in their side arms.”[30]
When Johnson’s book was published in 1964, creating the controversy, the CIA let it
be known that “Colonel Frank” (though unnamed) “denie[d] absolutely that he ever said
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U.S. authorities were to be ignored.” The army officer reportedly said that the exiles’
imperfect command of English had led to a misunderstanding. Former DCI Allen Dulles
was also reported to be “furious” over the allegation that such instructions were ever
conveyed to the Cuban leaders.[31]
A third possibility was injected into the record in the mid-1970s when CIA historian
Pfeiffer interviewed the late Jake Esterline, the CIA’s project director for the Bay of Pigs.
Pfeiffer quoted Esterline as speculating that Guatemala’s Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes and
Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza Debayle might have wanted to make known their interest
in providing the logistical support essential for the invasion if Washington backed out at
the penultimate minute. For ample reasons of their own, both rulers were cooperating
fully with the covert operation to depose Castro.
Only one thing seems clear given these conflicting, and by-now unresolvable accounts.
There was no message from CIA headquarters to the Cuban exiles in the field suggesting
that they gird themselves to defy the Kennedy administration, and prepare to stage a halfphony mutiny in order to see the invasion through. Talbot’s assertion to the contrary is
dubious and certainly unproven.
Talbot’s tendentious rendering of this episode points to what is the single greatest
defect of Brothers. Talbot is firmly in the CIA-as-rogue-elephant camp, a school of
thought embraced by Kennedy acolytes and apologists once the depth of covert activity
directed against Castro from 1961 to 1963 first became documented in the mid-1970s. No
amount of evidence matters to Talbot if it contradicts his perspective of a lethal, out-ofcontrol CIA. Simultaneously, Talbot blows all out of proportion other events in order to
suggest that the Kennedys’ attitude toward Castro was not as deadly as it appears. Indeed,
if Talbot is to be believed, rapprochement between Washington and Havana was just
around the corner but for the CIA’s unredeemable cold warriors.
Thus, Brothers devotes five pages to the highly publicized but initially-secret meeting
in August 1961—four months after the Bay of Pigs—between Richard Goodwin, a
Kennedy White House aide, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Cuban
revolutionary. Neither Castro—as he said at a 2002 conference in Havana—nor Kennedy
knew in advance of the meeting in Uruguay, and it was largely a media kerfluffle.
Nothing ever came of it except a box of Cuban cigars for Goodwin, who passed them
onto Kennedy.
Talbot goes on to identify Goodwin as a “benign influence in White House foreign
policy councils.”[32] Oddly, nowhere does the reader learn that just after the Bay of Pigs
debacle, Goodwin had been named head of a new task force dedicated to Castro’s
downfall. The government-wide, overt and covert program that resulted, Operation
MONGOOSE, might be called many things, but hardly benign. When it was unveiled at a
November 3, 1961 meeting at the White House, less than three months after Goodwin’s
celebrated encounter with Guevara, Robert Kennedy’s handwritten notes of the meeting,
which reflected his own deep involvement in the planning, stated that “My idea is to stir
things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans
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themselves with every group but Batistaites & Communists. Do not know if we will be
successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.”[33]
Eleven months later, the world came very close to a direct superpower clash of arms, if
not a conflict that could easily have involved tactical, theater, or even intercontinental
nuclear weapons. Operation MONGOOSE, far from being risk-free as Robert Kennedy
would have it, was a key factor in Havana’s acceptance of Soviet missiles on Cuban soil,
with nearly catastrophic consequences for everyone concerned. But rather than
identifying the grave consequences of the Kennedys’ fixation, Talbot focuses on the
trivial aspects of policy.
“There is no denying that Cuba’s revolutionary government was a major focus for the
brothers,” writes Talbot. “But it was not simply a morbid one. John Kennedy had an
intellectual and even playful curiosity [emphasis added] about the Cuban experiment and
its leaders that would eventually lead him to explore openings in the cold wall that had
been erected between the two nations.”[34] “Intellectual and playful curiosity” hardly
seems an apt description of the White House’s attitude toward Castro’s Cuba, given the
fact that a president named Kennedy initiated, and an attorney general named Kennedy
oversaw, a new covert program approved in June 1963 to precipitate Castro’s overthrow.
After refusing to acknowledge the nexus between MONGOOSE and missile crisis, it is
not surprising that Talbot ignores completely this subsequent effort, which spoke openly
of liquidating the “Castro/Communist entourage” and eliminating the Soviet presence in
Cuba prior to the November 1964 election, lest the GOP try to blame JFK for
communism 90 miles off the coast of Florida.[35] As before, assassination of Fidel Castro
himself was an integral element of this plan, though that aim was a tightly-held,
compartmented secret. What was referred to as the “possible death of Castro” could
hardly have been more central to the Kennedys’ scheme, as evinced by the fact that
Robert Kennedy “personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro,” as
Richard Helms explained to Henry Kissinger in 1975, just before the CIA’s darkest
secrets began to be officially exposed.[36] Instead of conveying accurately the complexity
of what happened, Talbot insists the CIA was insubordinate.[37]
Despite its deep, even egregious, flaws, Brothers is a book worth reading, but not
necessarily for the reason intended by Talbot. His book is more about the continuing
inability of a generation to come to grips with the Kennedys, and much less about the
brothers themselves. Brothers, in other words, is best understood as the latest in a long
series of efforts to obfuscate what happened in the early 1960s, if not turn that history on
its head. Talbot’s book is a less sophisticated version of the kind of tortured history about
the Kennedys and Cuba that the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. once produced. Yet even
Schlesinger knew better than to insinuate that elements of the U.S. government were
involved in JFK’s assassination. There has been only one honest and candid appraisal of
the Kennedy/Cuba nexus by a Kennedy insider, Harris Wofford’s 1980 book, Of
Kennedys & Kings.
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Lest readers wonder where I’m coming from politically, I am a lifelong Democrat who
voted for Jack Kennedy in 1960 and would have voted for him again in 1964, had I the
opportunity. I likely would have voted for Robert Kennedy in 1968 had he won the
nomination. While the Warren Commission’s findings had their flaws, I still accept the
panel’s conclusion of “a lone gunman” being responsible for President Kennedy’s
assassination. I would change my mind if convincing evidence were forthcoming, but I
have yet to see any.
George McGovern, the former senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, was
my academic adviser and instructor during my first two years at a small Methodist
college in South Dakota. He probably did more than any single person to shape my
political worldview, introducing me in his classes to such journalistic muckrakers as
Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, as well as such magazines as The Nation and The New
Republic. In 1961, President Kennedy named McGovern a special assistant and the first
director of the Food for Peace program. In the White House and later in Congress,
McGovern became close to Robert Kennedy.
I remain in occasional touch with McGovern, and spoke with him briefly after he gave
a lecture in Jupiter, Florida shortly before my book was published in the spring of 2005. I
mentioned that it was coming out and told him that it was “pretty hard on the Kennedys.”
His response: “When it comes to Cuba, it deserves to be.”
A recent issue of TIME magazine featured a direct debate (of sorts) between Talbot and
Bugliosi. David Talbot and Vincent Bugliosi, “The Kennedy Assassination: Was There a
Conspiracy?” TIME, 19 June 2007.
[1]
[2]
Talbot, Brothers, 6, 12.
Murgado reportedly changed or added “Kennedy” to his name after RFK’s
assassination in 1968. For some unexplained reason, Talbot refers to him only as “Angelo
Murgado,” and leaves off the “Kennedy”—perhaps to make Murgado appear less
ridiculous.
[3]
Descriptions supplied to author via e-mail, June 2007. Due to the fractious rivalries
still existing within the exile community, none of Murgado’s brigade colleagues were
willing to be identified by name. But one was in the same paratroop battalion as
Murgado.
[4]
The two standard works on the Bay of Pigs are Haynes Johnson, with Manuel Artime,
José Pérez San Román, Erneido Oliva, and Enrique Ruiz-Williams, The Bay of Pigs: The
Leaders’ Story of Brigade 2506 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1964), and Peter Wyden, Bay
[5]
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of Pigs: The Untold Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979). Angelo Murgado
Kennedy appears in neither book, an omission that is particularly striking with respect to
the former. According to reliable sources, RFK actively encouraged and cooperated with
Haynes Johnson’s effort, to the point where the attorney general helped arrange
interviews with all the key Cuban exiles.
Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case
That Should Have Changed History (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 378.
[6]
[7]
Talbot, Brothers, 11-12.
[8]
Ibid., 179.
[9]
Ibid., 179-180.
Manny Garcia, “Former Miami Zoning Inspector Pleads Guilty,” Miami Herald, 13
October 1999.
[10]
[11]
Talbot, Brothers, 180.
St. John Hunt’s attempt to cash in on his father’s notoriety was recently exposed by
Erik Hedegaard in “The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt,” Rolling Stone, 21 March
2007.
[12]
[13]
Talbot, Brothers, 405.
In 1975, Sturgis testified under oath before the Rockefeller Commission that “at no
time did he engage in any activity having to do with the assassination of President
Kennedy.” Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, Report to the
President (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 253. Talbot,
incidentally, implies without actually saying so that Sturgis was a CIA operative. The
Rockefeller Commission stated categorically that “Sturgis was not an employee or agent
of the CIA either in 1963 or at any other time. He so testified under oath himself, and a
search of CIA records failed to discover any evidence that he had ever been employed by
the CIA or had ever served it as an agent, informant or other operative.” Ibid., 252.
Talbot supplies no evidence to contradict this finding.
[14]
Talbot, Brothers, 398-399. Even if Morales was in Chile at the time, it is most
unlikely he would have been in La Moneda, the presidential palace, with the building
under bombardment by the Chilean military as the coup unfolded. Talbot also refers to
Allende being “killed” during the coup. An official Chilean inquiry, the results of which
were generally accepted, even by Allende family members, determined he had committed
suicide.
[15]
Telephone Interview with Clines, 12 June 2007. Clines also repudiated a statement
attributed to him that is posted on Spartacus Educational, a left-wing, British-based
[16]
Washington Decoded
website of often questionable veracity, e.g., that “Morales helped Felix Rodriguez capture
Che Guevara in 1965 [sic].” Guevara was captured and killed in 1967.
[17]
Telephone interview with Sternfield, 13 June 2007.
[18]
Talbot, Brothers, 446.
Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World
of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), 587.
[19]
Apart from “The Dorff Report,” a short-lived and now-defunct newsletter, Dorff’s
only written contribution to the assassination literature is a self-published novel, 22 Days
Hath November, which comes highly-praised by Fonzi.
[20]
Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993),
382-383. The House panel flatly rejected Fonzi’s unsubstantiated theories re CIA
complicity, finding in 1979 that “The Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation and
Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of President
Kennedy.” House Select Committee on Assassinations, Final Report (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1979), 2.
[21]
[22] Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason: On Solving History’s Greatest Murder Mystery, The
Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Rancho Santa Fe, CA: Laurel Publishing, 1997), 438439.
Jack Pfeiffer, “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation: Volume 3, Part III:
Changing Concepts,” 7, Box 1, CIA Miscellaneous, JFK Assassination Records
Collection, National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Talbot errs in attributing
declassification of Pfeiffer’s report to the National Security Archive. Although that nonprofit organization has done yeoman’s work in getting documents about U.S. covert
operations declassified, the Pfeiffer volume cited was discovered at the National Archives
by David M. Barrett, a political science professor at Villanova University (and member
of Washington DeCoded’s editorial board). Barrett located the Pfeiffer volume while
conducting research for his book, The CIA and Congress, and posted it on his website in
2005.
[23]
Talbot’s portrait of Bissell reflects another factual error on his part. Talbot
erroneously describes Bissell as “the principal architect of the Arbenz coup,” who “would
reassemble the key members of his Guatemala team for the Bay of Pigs operation.”
Talbot, Brothers, 44. Frank Wisner, who headed the Directorate of Plans in 1954, was in
complete command of the Guatemalan operation, code-named PBSUCCESS, which
resulted in deposing President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. As Bissell himself wrote in his
posthumously published memoir, “Some historical accounts of the Guatemala operation
have attributed a larger role to me than I actually played. For the most part, I served as
either a liaison or troubleshooter . . . ” Richard M. Bissell, Jr., with Jonathan E. Lewis
[24]
Washington Decoded
and Frances T. Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 90.
[25]
Talbot, Brothers, 47.
Curiously, instead of quoting from the Pfeiffer volume itself, which is readily
available, Talbot cites a Miami Herald article about the multi-volume history. And even
this news article contained a paragraph—not mentioned by Talbot—underscoring the
uncertainty about what Kennedy was actually told. “Historians say it is unclear whether
CIA Director Allen Dulles and his deputy [Bissell] passed this assessment along three
days later, at Kennedy’s post-election national security briefing in Palm Beach—and
whether changes were made as a result of the finding.” Carol Rosenberg, “Bay of Pigs
Plotters Predicted Failure,” Miami Herald, 11 August 2005.
[26]
[27]
Talbot, Brothers, 46.
[28]
Johnson, Bay of Pigs, 75.
Ibid., 76. It bears mentioning that the episode was not given any additional credence
in Peter Wyden’s widely acclaimed 1979 history of the Bay Pigs operation.
[29]
Seventh meeting of Taylor Commission, 1 May 1961. Egan’s comments are
contained only in the fully declassified (22 March 2000) version of the Taylor
Commission and not the earlier and heavily redacted version published in Luis Aguilar,
ed., Operation Zapata: The “Ultrasensitive” Report and Testimony of the Board of
Inquiry on the Bay of Pigs (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984).
[30]
Jack Raymond, “Books on CIA and Bay of Pigs Disturb Officials,” New York Times,
8 June 1964.
[31]
[32]
Talbot, Brothers, 64.
Document 270, “Editorial Note,” Department of State, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1961-63: Cuba 1961-1962 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1997), 666.
[33]
[34]
Talbot, Brothers, 60-61.
Document 346, “Paper Prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency for the Standing
Group of the National Security Council,” 8 June 1963, Department of State, Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1961-1963: Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), 828.
[35]
Ibid., 794, and Memorandum of Conversation between President Ford and Secretary
of State/National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, 4 January 1975, Gerald R. Ford
[36]
Washington Decoded
Library. For an article that puts this memo in context, see Why RFK Shunned the Inquiry
into His Brother’s Assassination.
[37]
Talbot, Brothers, 229.
©2007 by Don Bohning
Don Bohning began working on The Miami Herald’s Latin America desk in the spring of 1964, became its editor
in 1967, and retired in 2000. During his 41 years with the Herald, he won numerous journalism awards, including
the Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 1974 for contributions to inter-American understanding. He is the author of The
Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba 1959-1965 (Potomac Books, 2005).