The Telephone Logs

          

The “rogue elephant” question is a central theme of the book.  Did John Kennedy know of and approve the CIA’s plots against Fidel Castro?  This was Senator Frank Church’s question, and the Church Committee found no evidence of presidential approval.  But of course, this might be because of the way the CIA did business.  It didn’t commit to writing anything on such nasty subjects as assassination.  The book discusses the CIA’s aversion to putting things down on paper and its habit of faking the written record at times.

            But as Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s telephone logs revealed, the CIA couldn’t control everything.  From the National Archives, I obtained a copy of a cable from Paris to CIA headquarters saying that Rolando Cubela wanted to meet with Robert Kennedy personally for assurance that the Kennedys knew of and approved the CIA’s plan to have Cubela lead a coup in Cuba.  That cable was “slotted” at 2:50 in the afternoon of October 11, 1963, Washington DC time.  The slotted time, said a CIA administrative memorandum written in that period, was when cables were put into distribution at headquarters, but the cables were usually delivered to the action officer about an hour and a half earlier. Desmond Fitzgerald was the action officer on this cable, so it would have been delivered to his office around 1:30. 

            Upon reading the cable, Fitzgerald likely wondered if Robert Kennedy would agree to such a meeting.  Therefore, I asked Dan Moorin, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, to review the Attorney General’s telephone logs for the fall of 1963 at the Kennedy Library.  I gave Dan a list of names to look for, and he took this photograph of the record of a call from FitzGerald to Robert Kennedy within an hour of FitzGerald’s receipt of the cable on October 11.  It is some of the most direct and powerful evidence that the Kennedys were fully aware of what the CIA was doing and approved of it.  As any trial lawyer will tell you, there is a big difference between telling the jury about a document and letting them see it for themselves.