November 19, 1963 The White House record

While the CIA record in the previous post shows that November 19 was the day it made the decision to give Cubela assassination weapons, the White House log, below, shows that the CIA's deputy director for plans Richard Helms, FitzGerald's superior, met with John Kennedy from 6:15 until 6:55 that same evening.  Helms writes about this in his memoir, A Look over My Shoulder, and says he met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy first, and it was the attorney general who said he needed to see the president and called to make the appointment.
     Earlier this same day, the CIA had received a cable from the Paris station indicating that Cubela planned to return to Cuba.  If the CIA was to meet his request for assassination weapons, it was now or never.  Thus, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Helms's real purpose in going to Robert Kennedy was to see if the CIA should provide the weapons and that he bucked the decision up to his brother.
     Helms writes in his book that Hershel Peake was with him and brought along an FAL rifle with Cuban markings from an arms cache found in Venezuela.  A week earlier, the president asked Helms to get "hard evidence" of Castro exporting the revolution to other Latin American countries, and it is plausible that this was a reason for Helms's actions.  Moreover, Peake was a CIA officer stationed in Venezuela.  However, this doesn't adequately explain why Helms felt he had to go to Robert Kennedy first.  Since John Kennedy had been the one to ask for such hard evidence, why didn't Helms go directly to him?  Besides, the White House meeting lasted forty minutes, but Helms only devotes a paragraph to it in his memoir.  The likelihood is that the two men discussed more than the arms cache.  Given the length of the meeting, Helms probably needed a decision from the president, and, therefore, a time-consuming, back-and-forth conversation ensued, a conversation about whether to give in to Cubela's request for assassination weapons.

November 19, 1963 CIA memorandum for the record

A document pointing to the president's approval of the CIA's complicity in Cubela's plan to shoot Fidel Castro is this November 19, 1963, memorandum for the record by case officer Nestor Sanchez, who was handling Cubela.  Readers can see the document for themselves. 

     It is initialed by Sanchez.  It refers to Kennedy's Miami speech.  That was when he called Castro a "barrier to be removed."  Since that speech was delivered on Monday, November 18, the date on the memo is reinforced.  It also indicates that Sanchez will tell Cubela that FitzGerald, who he knows only as James Clark, helped write the speech.  By being sure Cubela has a copy of the speech, the CIA wants him to know his plan has Kennedy's support.

     Cubela will be given high-power rifles with scopes.  Their purpose is unmistakable.  PBRUMEN is Cuba; C-4 is an explosive; S/W is secret writing; and AMTHUG is Fidel Castro.

     Notice the last paragraph saying that FitzGerald wants written reports kept to a minimum.  If so, why did Sanchez put everything down in writing?  Bureaucrats normally write memorandum for the record when they worry that they might be blamed for something in the future and want a contemporaneous record.  An unanswered question is whose handwriting is on the memo.  It isn't Sanchez because he wouldn't write C/SAS and then spell out that this is FitzGerald.  Presumably the handwriting is a later investigator, perhaps the Inspector General.  But then the words "high power" are also in handwriting, and the original typed words are illegible.  That is odd.  

     I have included the National Archives' index sheet to make clear that this document has been declassified in full and is public.

      I say this document points to John Kennedy's approval because Richard Helms wrote in his memoir that he met with Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy this same day, November 19.  Although nothing proves this memo was written after the meeting, the connection is too strong to be coincidence.

Demeanor

A reader, who is a lawyer, emailed me to ask what the demeanor of the CIA witnesses was at the Church committee hearings in 1975-76.  In legal parlance, demeanor means how the witness presented himself while testifying.  Did he look like a liar?  Did you (the judge or jury) believe him?  On an appeal, the appellate court will defer to findings of fact by the trial judge because he was the one who saw the demeanor of the witness.

            Before answering, I want to point out differences between the Church Committee hearings and a trial.  First, one must distinguish between the Church committee’s public and nonpublic hearings.  At public hearings, only the senators and the chief counsel and minority counsel could ask questions.  At nonpublic hearings, the questioning tended to be a free-for-all among senators and staffers, whether lawyer or not.   Rarely if ever would there be an uninterrupted line of questioning by a single lawyer as you see in court trials.  This gave witnesses time to think about what they just said and correct it.  Moreover, the questioning at nonpublic hearings never got tough.  After all, the Senate is a political institution, and hearings are expected to be conducted with decorum.  They aren’t winner-take-all contests like court trials.  Senators and staff often knew the witnesses and were on good terms with them.  They might have chatted informally about the issues before the witnesses were questioned under oath.  Jim Angleton was example.  He went out of his way to talk to staffers at the committee’s offices.  He has been vilified at times, but that isn’t fair to the man.  He had his faults, but lying wasn't one of them.  Actually, he was better off the record than he seems in the formal transcripts.  Ted Shackley was another example.  He might be guarded in chats and careful with his words, but he never seemed to mislead.

    Richard Helms was different.   His testimony in Appendix B of the book was typical.  But then he operated at a much higher level than most other witnesses.  When Senator Church asked if the CIA were a rogue elephant, Helms was the pachyderm.  But he had long experience in both secret operations and political ones and was no amateur at answering questions when the stakes were high.

     Then there were witness like William Harvey.  He gave such rambling answers to questions that I don’t think anyone at the hearings understood him. Maybe that contributed to his success in working with spies.  In writing the book, I spent a great deal of time trying to decipher his testimony and, as I conclude in the book, think he was saying he had an assassination team in Cuba at the end of the missile crisis.  Yet the Church committee didn’t feel this way when it wrote its report.  They may have been so put off by the witness’s rambling demeanor that they didn’t read the transcript closely.

     Most other CIA witnesses had little to contribute to the question of whether the Kennedys knew of the assassination operations.  They never met with the Kennedys personally, and their superiors certainly weren’t going to share with them anything like assassination.  They came across as truthful, but that would be expected given their positions.

     Nestor Sanchez was different.  Years after he appeared before the Church Committee, he told Brian Latell for the book Castro’s Secrets that he met with Robert Kennedy more than once.  That would have startled the Church committee.  He never mentioned it to the committee according to the transcripts.  Then there was his testimony about what happened to the poison pen at the November 22 meeting with Cubela.  Sanchez couldn’t remember.  This wasn’t some long ago event at the time he testified.  It had happened only twelve years earlier and had to be the most momentous meeting in his CIA career.  As I say in the book, he had to know that the poison pen, or whatever it was, was terribly compromising for the CIA.  No CIA case officer would hand a foreign agent a piece of exotic technology and then not remember if the agent walked off with it.

     This brings me back to Richard Helms.  He appeared seven times before the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee.  He knew from Senator Church’s public rogue elephant question that the key issue was whether John Kennedy approved meeting Cubela’s request for assassination weapons.  Yet he never volunteered in any of his appearances that he had met with Kennedy on the very day the CIA made the decision to give Cubela those weapons.  Under such circumstances, Helms’s demeanor at the hearings doesn’t seem to matter.