To my great surprise, buried in the final, 2025 release of JFK Assassination document is CIA Director John McCone's Memorandum for the Record of his meeting with Lyndon Johnson on November 28, 1963. It is at pages 18-20 of NARA No. 104-10306-10018. There is no cover sheet, as is true with all the 2025 releases. The memo is included along with a number of other of McCone's MFRs of his meetings with the president immediately after the assassination. Only paragraph 2 of the memorandum dealing with Cuba had been made public before now. McCone recorded the President didn't want a repeition of the 1961 fiasco, meaning the Bay of Pigs. That was an invasion of Cuba by CIA-supported Cuban exiles. Still, "he felt that the Cuban situation was one we could not live with and we had to evolve more agressive policies."
As I wrote in Murder, Inc., at this time, the CIA was working on the codenamed AMLASH plot to overthrow Castro in a coup led by Rolando Cubela. The CIA was meeting with him in Paris at the very moment John Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Kennedy had ruled out an invasion of Cuba by the U.S. military after he got the Soviets to withdraw their ballastic missiles from the island during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He had let it be known privately that this no-invasion policy was conditioned on Fidel Castro's behaving himself, meaning he would not try to aid Communist revolutions to other Latin American countries. (I don't know if this no-invasion policy was communicated to the Soviets , but it seems likey that Kennedy would have had it communicated because it was face-saving for Nikita Khrushchev who was the one that had backed down to resolve the crisis).
On November 19, 1963, three days before the assassination, Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms had an urgent meeting first with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then the President to show them an automatic rifle found in a large cache of weapons found on the coast of Venezuela to be used by Communist rebels there in overthrowing, or at least destabilizing the government. This was the "hard evidence" of Castro's exporting the revolution that Kennedy had asked the CIA to find at previous meetings.
While we don't know what the President said to Helms at that November 19 meeting after the hard proof was put before him, we do know from CIA internal memos that this was the same day the CIA case officer managing Cubela was told that the CIA would give him the assassination weapons he had been asking the CIA for since September for the purpose of killing Castro as the first step in the coup. The CIA called Cubela the day after Helms's meeting with the President to arrange the November 22 meeting with him. The case officer testified that Cubela would assume from the phone call that the CIA was prepared to give him assassination weapons. There is at least some evidence suggesting that Cubela had been told U.S. troops might invade Cuba to prevent his attempted coup from failing.
Thus, what McCone says in the memo is hard to reconcile with the facts. Did Johnson not know about the Cubela plot? He said he wanted a more agressive policy. It's hard to imagine anything more agressive than a plot for assassination of the leadership in Cuba, a coup, and a possible invasion. Why didn't McCone tell him?
In any event, as related in my book, in less than a month, Johnson views had changed completely. He backed off from wanting a more agressive approach. Instead, he began ordering the CIA to dismantle all covert operations against Cuba. That was accomplished by June 1964.
