This is the original English text of the article published in Spanish in Triunfo, issue #403, page 34, on 21-02-1970.
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The Day They Tried to Murder Castro
by Thomas G. Buchanan
The adversaries of the Bay of Pigs—Castro and Kennedy—were both to have been murdered in the latter part of 1963 by plotters using a technique with striking similarities.
In each case, the success of the adventure was dependent on the use of a high building overlooking the assassination site. The course of history was changed by a routine police precaution—taken in one case, neglected in the other.
That is the conclusion this reporter reached after an interview with an official of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior—a man whose job it is to scent assassination plots and thwart them.
My informant is a huge, athletic man, clean-shaven. He is in his thirties, and appears to be quite capable of serving as a bodyguard himself, if circumstances justified his intervention. A bespectacled translator poured us each a daiquiri and then began to carry out his function of communication. It was not until the interview was nearly over that the Ministry of the Interior official started answering in hesitant but almost faultless English.
We were seated in a villa built, he told me, for the mistress of the richest gangster in Havana. Following the downfall of Batista, all such property, both overseas and in Havana, was claimed by the new government. The young lady had, apparently, been fond of mirrors. They were everywhere—particularly in her bathroom. I asked what had happened to her.
“We in Cuba have a problem,” he replied, “in trying to maintain a favorable balance of our trade. There are, however, some commodities of which we have a surplus. We export them to Miami! But they send us certain products which we have been trying to eliminate. Since 1960, we have had a great deal of experience in the protection of our government officials from attempts to kill them. That is a commodity which we would like to stop importing!”
I asked him if he could now reveal some of the methods used by the Cuban police to keep the enemies of Castro from attaining their objectives. He began to trace designs upon a piece of paper.
“One of our provincial governors,” he said, “was planning an inspection trip. The time of his departure was uncertain, but there was only one route that he could take to reach his destination. This route passed through a thick wooded area in which a counter-revolutionary group had planned to wait in ambush. An accomplice in a car was parked in the provincial city where the office of the governor was situated. It was his job to detect the governor’s departure and to drive behind his car until they neared the woods, where he would blink his headlights to inform his friends that they should fire on the car he was trailing. One group, armed with rifles, waited on the left side of the road; the other, farther down the highway on the right side. It was thought that, if the first group missed, the target car would swerve toward the second group in order to elude the bullets.”
“Did the governor escape?” I asked him.
“Yes. In this case,” he replied, “the task of the assassins was somewhat more complicated than they had anticipated, since the governor’s car was accompanied on that trip by a second vehicle containing three armed bodyguards. These men remained at a short interval behind the governor. Thus the accomplice was unable to assume his planned position, but he blinked his lights as he approached the woods and then turned off the road in order to escape. The signal was interpreted correctly. The first shots were fired at the car leading the procession, but its occupants were not hit by this fusillade, whose purpose was primarily to force the car toward the other marksmen. At the sound of gunfire, the chauffeur driving the bodyguards accelerated and drew level with the governor’s car to protect him. Normally, he would have come up on the left side but, anticipating that the first shots might be the preliminary to a crossfire, he placed his car on the opposite flank and was thus in a position to provide a screen when shots began to come from that direction. In accordance with instructions previously given, the car which contained the governor continued, but the bodyguards brought their car to a halt and plunged into the woods in an attempt to capture the assassins. They killed one of these men and captured two others. Some of them escaped, however, and we never found them.”
I asked whether Fidel Castro had escaped, at any time, by such a narrow margin. The official of the Ministry of the Interior reflected, then began to draw another little sketch to show me the terrain conditions that prevailed during the incident which he was now explaining.
“Here you see the highway leading from downtown Havana to the airport,” he informed me. “They knew that Fidel’s car would be forced to slow down at the intersection of these streets, to go around a traffic circle. One of them was parked in a small side street facing the main highway. It was to have started moving slowly forward from the left side as Fidel approached it. Meanwhile, from the right side, two men were to have run out, one throwing a grenade, the other firing small arms, when the car had blocked the path of the approaching vehicle. At the same time, a second car was to be moving slowly in the opposite direction, and the plan called for the whole group of assassins to escape in this car.”
I suggested that it was surprising that a plan which seemed to be so carefully prepared had not succeeded. What had the conspirators forgotten?
My informant smiled. “What usually happens in these cases is that some one comes to us and tells us where to station our policemen!”
“Can your agency afford to take time to investigate all such reports?” I asked, remembering excuses furnished by the different police agencies concerned after the Kennedy assassination.
“We feel that we cannot afford, in any such case, to ignore the information that we have been furnished,” he responded gravely.
“What do you consider to have been the plot on Castro’s life which came the closest to succeeding?”
He began to trace another of his sketches. “It was in the summer or the early fall of 1963,” he stated.
“Just before the Kennedy assassination, then?” I interrupted.
He confirmed this.
“I remember,” he asserted, “that our President, Osvaldo Dorticós, was just returning to the country after a short trip to New York, where he made a speech to the United Nations. In that speech, the President had mentioned that attempts at sabotage and murder had been carried out in Cuba by opponents of the government who had been trained in foreign countries. He proposed that all activities of this sort in the Western Hemisphere be discontinued. He was scheduled to address a public meeting on this question, shortly after his return. The meeting was to take place in the public square outside the Presidential Palace. Dorticós and Castro were to stand together on the balcony, as was their custom, with the crowd assembled in the square before them.
“From the standpoint of security, there was a danger in this situation. On their right side, as they faced the crowd, there was a high apartment building. Any sniper in a corner window of one of the upper floors would have a clear shot, at a range of from 100 to 150 meters, at our nation’s two top government officials. And in fact, four armed assassins planned to be there, at a corner window on the eighth floor, on the afternoon in question.”
“How did they intend to gain admittance to this room?” I asked him.
“They had an accomplice in the building—some one who, for years, had lived there. But the shots were not to come from his room. In the first place, it was not located in the right position; in the second place, he did not want to take the risk that some one might see the assassins coming out of his room.”
“What, then, was the role of the accomplice?” I inquired.
“His role was, first, to notify the others that a corner room which overlooked the balcony was vacant; second, to have keys made that would fit the door of this room; third, to furnish floor plans of the building and a study of the habits of each tenant; finally, to bring the weapons, disassembled, into the apartment building and keep them in his apartment until the arrival of the men who planned to fire them. He arrived one day, a short time before the assassination was to take place, with a number of small packages wrapped in old newspapers and in brown wrapping paper. He informed his wife that she was not to touch them, but to leave them in a closet until one of his friends came to get them.”
“When did his accomplices enter the building?”
“The first two arrived a little after dark, the night before they planned to carry out their project. They were dressed in military uniforms used by the Cuban Army. One of them—the leader—wore an officer’s insignia. Since there were tenants in the building who were members of the national armed forces and habitually wore their uniforms, the presence of these men attracted no attention. The purported officer was able, consequently, to make two trips to the room of’ their accomplice and bring back the packages, still wrapped in paper. Once they were inside the eighth-floor corner room, using the key they had been furnished, they unwrapped the packages and started to assemble the assassination weapons—a bazooka and two rifles. Their accomplices arrived an hour later. These two men were dressed as members of the citizens’ militia which is ordinarily assigned a function of police protection and of’ crowd control in public meetings. They were armed with submachine guns, which they carried openly into the building, since it was the customary weapon of the citizens’ militia.”
“What was each man’s function, during the assassination?”
“Well, the meeting the next day was scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. The president, Osvaldo Dorticós, was scheduled to appear upon the balcony at that time. The Prime Minister and other government officials would be standing on the balcony beside him. From the ground, only their heads and shoulders would be visible, but from the eighth-floor window where the four assassins were located, two-thirds of the body of each man upon the balcony would be exposed.”
“Did they intend to use a telescopic sight?”
“No. Telescopic sights were used in other cases which we have investigated but, on this occasion, firing at a stationary target at comparatively close range, it was not considered necessary. The plan was to have been executed shortly after Dorticós had started speaking. At that time, the officer was to have gone into the hall to push a button summoning the automatic elevator to the eighth floor, where he planned to block the door so that the elevator would be waiting for them. After that, he would return to the apartment and his three accomplices would take their places. The two men with rifles would be standing at the window which gave access to the Presidential Palace. Each of them would aim at Castro. A third man with the bazooka, standing at a window on the side that faced the public square, would aim his weapon at the rear part of the crowd. The three would fire at the same instant. The bazooka shot would land within the crowd and then explode an instant later. No one would have had time to identify the point from which the rifles had been fired before a great explosion would have taken place in an entirely different direction, killing people and creating panic. The spectators would be running from this area, and the police would run toward it. During this commotion, the two men with rifles could continue firing, if their first shots missed the target. After that, they would run out into the hall, leaving the rifles, the bazooka and the paper in which they were wrapped behind them, but retaining the two submachine guns. They were going to take the elevator to the third floor, then descend by foot, using the stairway to the ground floor.”
I recalled that similar use of the elevator was attributed to Oswald, in the Kennedy assassination. The official of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior explained this. “They considered that this method would reduce the chances that they might be trapped inside the elevator if police should rush into the building before it had reached the ground floor,” he informed me. “There was just one exit from the building—the main entrance. By this time, however, they expected that the square would be a scene of panic, and the presence of four men in uniform—including two militiamen with submachine guns—probably would pass unnoticed. They would run for one block to their right, away from the assassination scene; then turn a corner and run two more short blocks to a point where they had left a car.”
“And after that?”
“According to the version that they gave us later, the three men expected to be driven to their leader’s home, located in the suburbs of Havana. They did not know what would happen, after that. They said that no one but their chief knew how they would escape. Their leader told us that he planned to telephone from his home to a fisherman from Varadero, who would meet them at an undisclosed location on the coast and help them to escape by boat to the United States.”
“But you are skeptical about this?” I suggested.
“We do not believe the story. The use of the telephone at that time would have added an unnecessary danger of detection, since the rendezvous could have been planned before then. We think that their leader had another reason for returning to his home. We do not think he planned to leave the country.”
“And the others?”
“It is interesting to observe that we found fingerprints on the assassination weapons and the wrapping paper that the leader handled, but they were not his prints. All the fingerprints we found belonged to his assistants. We consider this to be an indication that the three accomplices were to be murdered later. There would then be nothing that would link their leader with Fidel’s assassination. The police would find three weapons and the corpses of three men who left their fingerprints upon them.”
“How did you prevent the execution of this plan?” I asked.
“The four men took elaborate precautions to avoid detection. They did not turn on the lights in the apartment. They remained beside the door, where they could not be seen from any of the windows. They did not smoke cigarettes. They talked in whispers. After they had quietly assembled all their weapons, they sat down and ate the sandwiches which they had brought with them, then went to sleep upon the floor. At five o’clock next morning, two men who were members of the national security police opened the door with their own key and found the four accomplices asleep, surrounded by their weapons. They surrendered without offering the least resistance.”
“How did the police know where to find them?”
“We did not have any information, that time, that would indicate that a conspiracy existed. It was simply a routine precaution to check all the vacant rooms in buildings overlooking the site of a public meeting where both Dorticós and Castro would be present.”
I thought of the book depository building overlooking Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was murdered. “If, instead of speaking from the balcony, your leaders had been scheduled to drive in an open car from the Havana airport through the center of the city, would you have been able to search all the buildings lining the parade route?” I inquired.
“To the extent that this was possible,” he answered. “We would concentrate upon the areas that seemed to us to represent the greatest danger—anything, for instance, that would cause the car to stop, or to reduce its speed.”
“If you knew that the car would have to make a right turn, then a left turn shortly afterward, would that constitute a hazard?”
“Maximum security precautions would be taken at that point, and all surrounding buildings would be searched,” he answered.
“Did you find out where these men obtained their weapons?” I inquired.
“The rifles and the submachine guns were of Belgian make, and had presumably been stolen from the Cuban Army in the early months after the revolution when a shipment of such weapons, ordered by Batista, was belatedly delivered. The control of weapons of this type was not begun at once, and we now realize that many small arms passed at this time into the hands of the government’s opponents. The control of heavy weapons like bazookas was, however, exercised from the beginning. We can thus affirm quite definitely that the one we found in the apartment was not stolen from our army, but was shipped to the conspirators from the United States by agents of the C.l.A.”
“How do you know that it had not been purchased in America by anti-Castro Cubans?” I asked the official.
“It is difficult, in certain cases, to be sure about this,” he acknowledged. “But by now we know their habits. The routine procedure, at the time this incident occurred, was for a weapons shipment to be sent aboard a vessel furnished by the C.I.A. An agent of the C.I.A. accompanied the shipment, but made no attempt to land in Cuba. Smaller vessels capable of very high speed set forth from the mother ship toward the Cuban coast, when it was sighted. Each of these was manned by counter-revolutionary Cubans. They would land in a deserted spot at night, unload their weapons quietly and return at full speed to the mother vessel waiting for them just outside of Cuban waters. Their accomplices in Cuba subsequently would transfer these weapons to more permanent arms caches, many of which were eventually captured. The participation of the C.I.A. may be deduced from the fact that deliveries, during this period, sometimes included heavy weapons like magnetic mines, still packed in their original crates and addressed to military posts in the United States. If there were any doubt about the C.I.A.’s participation in the assassination plot I have just cited, it has been resolved by the confessions of the men we captured in the apartment.”
