Fidel Castro knew that Lee Harvey Oswald was planning to assassinate President John F.Kennedy weeks in advance, a respected former CIA analyst claims in a bombshell new book.
Adding to nearly half a century of speculation and intrigue, Dr Brian Latell, a retired CIA intelligence officer who has tracked Castro since the 1960s, has turned up what he says is compelling evidence of what the Cuban president knew and when he knew it, based on declassified documents and interviews with defectors.
Dr Latell, one of America’s foremost Latin America experts whose analysis of Cuban affairs has helped to shape US policy over the years, admitted that he had startled even himself with his findings, which blow open history books and raise additional questions about the CIA’s own knowledge of the affair.
The provenance of the claims, however, makes them compelling, he said.
“My argument is very scrupulously and carefully documented,” Mr Latell told The Times yesterday.
“I have interviewed a large number of high-level defectors from the Cuban intelligence services, read as many as 50,000 declassified US government documents, mainly CIA documents. My argument is one I only really reluctantly embrace myself. I realise the magnititude.” The claims, revealed in Mr Latell’s new book Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine, are based on disclosures from sources including Major Florentino Aspillaga, a “master spook” in Cuba’s General Intelligence Directorate, whose defection to the CIA in 1987 was noted as one of the most damaging desertions ever faced by Castro.
In debriefings to the CIA 25 years ago, whose content has remained secret until repeated to Dr Latell in a recent interview, Mr Aspillaga claimed that on November 22, 1963 he was ordered by Cuban intelligence chiefs to drop his usual duties in Havana to listen out for news from Texas instead — the nature of which was unspecified to him at the time.
Hours later, President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, by American Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, a known communist sympathiser whose links to the Cuban regime have for decades been a cause of speculation.
“Castro knew...They knew Kennedy would be killed,” Mr Aspillaga told his CIA handlers in 1987.
Mr Latell also reveals how the late Jack Childs — noted by the FBI as one of its greatest Cold War agents for his 25-year infiltration of the US Communist Party from the 1950s onwards — told his handlers that Castro had made a shocking revelation to him during a meeting in 1964.
While visiting the Cuban embassy in Mexico City weeks before President Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald had become agitated at Havana’s refusal to grant him a visa and had ranted to officials: “I’m going to kill Kennedy for this,” Castro told Mr Childs, according to FBI documents.
The Cuban embassy in Mexico City was known at the time as a hot-bed of anti-US espionage. Hours after President Kennedy’s murder, FBI eavesdropping devices there picked up conversations between Cuban officers discussing details about Oswald that were not yet known publicly in the US.
Telephone taps also recorded a conversation in which a Cuban intelligence official rang to ask embassy worker Luisa Calderon whether she had heard about President Kennedy’s shooting. “Yes of course. I knew about it almost before Kennedy did,” she told him.
Castro — who a year earlier had come close to nuclear war with the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis and who knew that the CIA had plotted to kill him — felt no obligation to blow the whistle on Oswald.
Mr Latell, the CIA’s former national intelligence officer for Latin America and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami, states in the book: “Fidel knew of Oswald’s intentions and did nothing to deter the act.”
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